In the heart of the Chartreuse mountain range, not far from the city of Grenoble, lies the small town of Saint-Geoire-en-Valdaine. Once known for Huguenot rebellions and clandestine Catholicism during the French Revolution, it is now most remarkable for its concentration of typical Dauphinois architecture. Its town hall, formerly the Château de Montcla, features stone turrets that straddle the line between rusticity and refinement; the 12th-century Saint-Georges church’s flamboyant Gothic style is set off by its views over the mountain peaks.
Alongside these and other testaments to the village’s rich history, Saint-Geoire-en-Valdaine’s local brewery serves, in some ways, as its eighth castle.
The large stone building is half-hidden, located alongside a stream in the lush valley. This is the home of La Dauphine, a brewery owned by Catherine Dereume. But it’s not Dereume who’s brewing here today. Rather, Charlotte Desombre and Amandine Delafon, co-founders of the itinerant Cocomiette, are here with independent brewer Nathalie Munsch to make beer, as they do once every few weeks. And they’re doing so with a distinct ingredient: local, organic bread.
Delafon and Desombre have been friends for 20 years, but going into business together wasn’t originally part of the plan. Desombre remembers clearly the day they were discussing Delafon’s desire to break free from consulting and forge forward with a business of her own. The conversation stirred up something latent. “I had kind of put it to one side,” Desombre recalls, but upon hearing her friend express her dream, “Something kind of clicked for me, like a wake-up call.”
They began to explore the possibilities of a business focused on some form of environmental activism, a priority they both shared. Soon, they settled on a goal: to create a circular-economy project that could help tackle the problem of food waste. When they stumbled upon Brussels Beer Project’s bread beer, the idea for Cocomiette started to take shape.
Bread is essential to the French way of life. According to the Observatoire du Pain (French Bread Observatory), the French consume a daily average of 125 grams (¼ lb) per person, with 41% of French people enjoying bread three times a day. This year, France has even nominated the baguette for inclusion in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage register. But in France, 10% of bread is wasted each year, according to news agency BFM, representing 13% of all French food waste and a whopping 150,000 total tons of lost bread. Much of this waste happens at the retail level: According to a 2016 study from French ecological transition agency ADEME, 9.6% of bread produced in French bakeries goes unsold.
“I was pretty revolted, because bread in France is a fairly emblematic food. It requires the production of grains, human labor. And we just chuck tons of it into the bin.”
Delafon first stumbled upon this reality in 2015, while consulting on an app established by Lyon’s food bank to streamline local food donations. While the app’s purpose was to reduce food waste, during her consultancy, Delafon discovered something worrying. “I was there at the very beginning of the project, and that’s when I realized the sheer amount of bread some of them had on their hands at the end of the day,” she recalls. Given bread’s short shelf life, the food bank could only take a fraction of it; everything else went to waste.
“I was pretty revolted, because bread in France is a fairly emblematic food,” Delafon says. “It requires the production of grains, human labor. And we just chuck tons of it into the bin.” She knew she wanted to do something about it, but she wasn’t quite sure what, at first. “It stayed in a little corner of my mind,” she says.
Desombre grew up in France’s Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, on the border with Belgium. Early on, she knew that she wanted to start her own business. “I’ve wanted to build something since I was 18 years old,” she says, noting that she filled countless notebooks with ideas, including one that later became the subject of her university thesis: bringing the region’s French fry shops to Hong Kong. Instead, her focus soon became yet another export from her native North: beer.
Unlike in most of the rest of wine-focused France, beer enjoys a long history in the region now known as Hauts-de-France, which shares many culinary and cultural traditions with Belgium. Despite the area’s brewing heritage, however, Desombre recalls growing up on industrial beers; her introduction to craft came as a pleasant surprise. “That’s when I started to say to myself … beer can taste like something else,” she says.
The two friends had a mission and a project in mind, but there was one hiccup: The pair’s knowledge base did not extend to brewing. Instead, they tapped a third member of the team, Nathalie Munsch—a local independent brewer with, to hear her tell it, an “atypical” background.
“I graduated from art school, so nothing to do with beer,” Munsch explains. While attending school, she worked as a waitress, then a bar manager. Like Desombre and Delafon, she could feel an entrepreneurial spirit simmering within her: She wanted to create her own business, to be the boss of her own time.
“Since it’s very difficult to eat and live off of art, to meet the needs of a family, that remained a hobby,” she says. “I focused on other things, and among them, I discovered this taste for artisan work, for making things, for working with my hands.”
Through her bar work, she forged connections with brewers, and in 2002, Munsch opened her own brewery, La Frivole. Ten years later, she became an independent consulting brewer. In 2017, Delafon and Desombre first reached out with a proposition that Munsch couldn’t help but find intriguing.
“Since it’s very difficult to eat and live off of art, to meet the needs of a family, that remained a hobby. I focused on other things, and among them, I discovered this taste for artisan work, for making things, for working with my hands.”
“They had this idea of making a beer with bread, a really cool project, and they came to ask me how to make beer out of bread,” Munsch recalls. At that, Desombre laughs, leaning over the picnic table outside the brewery to place a hand on Munsch’s arm. “Well, first, how to make beer!” Desombre says.
Munsch is more reserved than bubbly Desombre, but now she laughs. “And then how to make beer with bread,” she corrects. “So after those first hesitations of, ‘I don’t know!’ we started doing tests, and we got there.”
Munsch is modest about her role in the project which, from a technical standpoint, demanded quite a bit of experimentation. But she says that this is what attracted her to it in the first place, despite the fact that she had a full roster of other clients. “What I liked about the Cocomiette project, in comparison with others, was that challenging side of it,” Munsch says. “All of that wasted bread, gathering up that lost product to make beer, that’s awesome. And that’s the challenge.”
This challenge, Munsch explains with a natural flair for pedagogy, is twofold. First, bread as a brewing ingredient must be supplemented with additional malt to provide an adequate amount of fermentable sugars. And then, of course, there’s a textural issue to contend with: The ingredient, Munsch says, has a tendency to compact and make “a kind of cake batter” that can cause a stuck mash.
To counteract this two-pronged issue, the quantity of bread in each brew is capped at 30 to 35%, depending on which beer they’re making. They also rely on another food waste product: organic rice hulls, a byproduct of the rice industry commonly burned after harvest, that the team uses as a natural filter. “It allows us to put a large quantity of bread in our beers without having any filtration issues,” says Munsch.
The bread itself is sourced locally from organic supermarkets and bakeries. To help it get from point A to point B, the team relies on URBY’s Thomas Ribeiro, who covers hundreds of miles a week as he shuttles goods to individuals, professionals, schools, and other organizations by bicycle.
“It’s really very varied,” he says, perched on his bike outside one of the organic supermarkets with which the brewery works. “This week I’m up to 270 kilometers.”
When it comes to Cocomiette, Ribeiro’s mission is simple. Whenever a shop has enough leftover bread to make it worth the journey—about 22 lbs—he bikes over and collects it in strong malt bags upcycled from the brewery. He then transports it to Cocomiette’s storage space at the MIN (Marché d’intérêt National, or National Interest Market) in Grenoble, where Delafon slices it, dries it, and grinds it into breadcrumbs using a state-of-the-art Crumbler.
“We try to get something pretty homogenous, when it comes to the bread,” Munsch says, noting that what they receive will vary from week to week. “We use all kinds of different breads, because that’s the goal. If we limited ourselves to just one kind of bread, we’d waste a lot.”
Whatever they receive is usually combined into one big hodgepodge of crumbs, though as of recently, the bread from one specific bakery is stored apart.
Pain de Belledonne, France’s only exclusively organic baker, chocolatier, biscuit shop, and candy maker, is about to celebrate its 30th birthday. Its partnership with Cocomiette began in 2019, when the team approached the bakery to suggest a collaboration. Pain de Belledonne’s Sandra Lowtun had already been ruminating on circular-economy projects before ever hearing about the local brewery, so when Cocomiette came to her, it seemed like fate.
“Their concept is really based on reducing food waste, and I thought that was great,” says Lowtun. The Cocomiette team asked, at first, for unsold bread, but as a bakery rather than a shop, Lowtun explains, they had very little, if any at all. “We bake only what people order,” she says.
The company had, however, just begun producing sandwich bread, and since shops buy it sliced and with the heels removed, a key waste product was indeed available for the brewery. While it took some time to settle on the details, specifically because some sandwich bread contains milk, they eventually worked out a system that’s beneficial to both companies. To celebrate the partnership—and the bakery’s anniversary—Pain de Belledonne has recently begun sending other breads to Cocomiette, so that they can brew a limited-edition beer.
“The goal is to sell it in our shops,” says Lowtun, “but also to talk about it at after-work events, in order to broach the subject of the fight against food waste and everything we can do with circular-economy projects.” There’s even talk, down the line, of Pain de Belledonne collecting the spent grain from the brewery to make biscuits or crackers. “I think that would be fun, some day, and I think we’ll do it,” says Munsch. “It would be kind of a looped loop.”
At the MIN, Delafon has developed a labeling system so she knows where each batch of bread was sourced from and how long it’s been drying. Generally, she says, she’ll grind the dried bread before Ribeiro arrives with a new load on Thursday mornings, but it depends on the weather and the humidity.
When it’s time to brew, Delafon loads her car and drives the crumbs to the brewery. For now, the team opts to contract brew, relying on La Dauphine for the first 150 hectoliters (92 barrels) and moving to nearby Brasserie du Slalom in the Vercors for bigger batches. And since Desombre lives in Paris, they also now brew in the Île-de-France region, in collaboration with local bakeries, at Brasserie HESPEBAY. This allows them to provide beer to the Paris market without undertaking the 375-mile journey from Isère.
The eco-minded logic seems fitting. In 2019, ADEME invested €124 million into furthering greener business projects in Cocomiette’s home Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, allowing more than 500 renewable energy and circular-economy projects to take off. Add to this a growing local interest in craft beer—which Nicolas Dumortier, co-founder of Bieronomy.com and co-organizer of the Lyon Bière Festival, credits to the increasing number of young people who have relocated here in recent years—and it was an ideal spot for Cocomiette to take root.
“Young consumers are maybe more likely to embrace the challenges of the future,” says Dumortier. “So that might be what makes them orient themselves towards more sustainable products.” Marlène Henrion, the agro-alimentary coordinator for the regional agriculture department, posits that the local focus, not just on beer, but on the environment, may indeed be linked to “this generation of microbrewery creators, who are definitely more aware of these values than those who came before them.”
Brewing at multiple locations means the team must be vigilant about standardization and consistency, adapting the recipes for each setting based on the bread, the tools, and the water (which, in Saint-Geoire-en-Valdaine, is drawn from a local well) available nearby. Whether brewed at La Dauphine, in the Vercors, or in Paris, Cocomiette’s lineup includes four different beers, which are categorized, in French tradition, not by their style, but by their color: Blanche (White), Rousse (Red), Blonde (Blond), and the exception—IPA.
“I said to myself: The bread has to add something. And I said to myself: With a Red ale, I can do something where the toasty aromas of the bread will actually add something to the beer. A bread-based beer that will be even better than if I was made just with malt.”
The Rousse is the flagship. Desombre recalls it as Munsch’s first jolt of inspiration. “I remember just sort of saying, ‘OK, so what should we do…’” Desombre says. “And right away you said, ‘No, we have to do a Red.’ You already had your idea!”
Munsch offers a modest smile.“You were talking to me about bread, and I thought about those toasty aromas, and … I didn’t want to add bread just for the sake of adding bread,” she says. “I said to myself: The bread has to add something. And I said to myself: With a Red Ale, I can do something where the toasty aromas of the bread will actually add something to the beer. A bread-based beer that will be even better than if it was made just with malt.”
The rest of the lineup grew up around this philosophy. The Blonde is not an Ale but a thirst-quenching, fresh Lager; an aromatic yet accessible IPA has middle-of-the-road bitterness and “character without being too extreme.” As for the Blanche, Munsch laughingly notes, it’s a Wheat Beer with a lightly copper hue that might surprise some Witbier drinkers.
“I shouldn’t say this, as a brewer,” Munsch says. “But I don’t like Blanches. They’re not my favorite beers. So when I make a Blanche, I make a Blanche for people who don’t like Blanches.” Cocomiette’s Blanche is infused with five different spices, and Sorachi Ace hops add an almost gingery note, yielding a “White” that is refreshing, fruity, and darker than most other beers sharing its name.
But despite the success of the other three beers, Munsch was right to begin with the Red: This flagship, with its rich, bready aromas and the lightest suggestion of cinnamon, remains Cocomiette’s star, the brewery’s best-seller and a silver medalist in the 2019 Concours National de Bière (National Beer Awards). While Desombre notes that the other beers, notably the IPA, are starting to catch up with the Red in terms of sales, it remains the lynchpin—the one most likely to appear on bottle shop shelves.
The team has already started planning their next recipe—Munsch is enticed by the idea of a Dark Ale—though they remain undecided as to whether it should be another core beer or a seasonal choice. For now, the discussion has been tabled during the COVID-19 lockdowns, which have had their effect on Cocomiette, as on all businesses.
While, as Delafon notes, they would have liked to hire another full-time person this year, for now, they are in subsistence mode: The two full-time founders and Munsch’s thrice-weekly consultancy are rounded out by new arrival Diane Falzon, who is helping out with sales and marketing in Paris.
The founders are quick to note that the all-women team was far from a purposeful choice, and while Desombre says that people often push her to highlight it in marketing statements, Delafon maintains that, “On the contrary, we think that diversity is super important.”
That said, it does make Cocomiette stand out. “Brewing is still a very masculine sector,” says Munsch. “In my professional life, I haven’t had very many female colleagues.”
The resulting dynamic, she says, is “really nice.” This is perhaps doubly true given that Delafon, Desombre, and Munsch are also all working mothers. With Delafon’s three children, Munsch’s four, and Desombre’s five (“We could start a school just for us!” Munsch laughs), flexibility is an essential part of the Cocomiette puzzle.
“Some people might say that it’s an inconvenience, that we have constraints, but I think it’s a spectacular strength,” says Munsch. “Because when you’ve got lots of children, you have to be incomparably organized and resourceful.” “We understand each other right away,” adds Desombre. “We know what it’s like to have a sick kid. We know what it’s like to have a [COVID-19] contact case. We get it! We work around it!”
It’s perhaps no surprise that so many other women have gravitated towards the project. Dereume, the owner of La Dauphine and the granddaughter of a Belgian brewer, has long been a pioneer of local brewing; the bottle label featuring a little hummingbird and a reclining Mother Nature is the work of artist Delphine Cauly; the typography comes from Clémentine Cornu Thenard of Studio Avenir. Even the name, Cocomiette, was the idea of a friend of theirs, Sylvie Hoarau of French folk duo Brigitte.
Today, there’s something undoubtedly magnetic about the team and their project. But to hear Desombre tell it, several collaborators were unconvinced by the prospect, at least at first. Cauly, for example, reacted to the proposition with skepticism.
“She started off telling us that doing drawings for a beer label wasn’t…” Desombre laughs, seeking her words. “That normally that wouldn’t really be her thing? But then she heard more about the project, and she decided to do it.”
Similarly, organic supermarket Biocoop initially resisted stocking the beer due to the presence of non-organic hops: Though their usage was permissible by the organic certification, it was frowned upon by the chain. “They stocked us anyway,” Desombre says. “They saw that we were sincere in our approach.”
Even Munsch was concerned, at first, that she was far too busy for a new collaboration.
“I said to myself, ‘Oh, no, I’m already overwhelmed,’” she recalls. “‘I’ve got absolutely no time.’”
But as she got to know Desombre and Delafon, she warmed to the idea and its eco-responsible ideals. “It feels good to be a part of this kind of project,” she says.
Maybe it’s this—their undeniable authenticity, that their values are divorced from bandwagoning or greenwashing—that attracts so many to Cocomiette. Or maybe it’s the genuine affection and heart at the project’s core: Desombre and Delafon, who have managed to maintain their decades-long friendship throughout this adventure.
Assuming their roles within the company was easy, Desombre says. Already living in Paris and the Rhône-Alpes, respectively, they divvied up their tasks effortlessly. Desombre takes care of the marketing and communications side of things, while Delafon is involved in development, finance, and production.
“We really complete one another,” Desombre says. “Amandine loves project management and is very goal-oriented.” Desombre, meanwhile, says that she herself “is more action-driven. I need to be active. And I love the creative side of things, too.”
“I’m thrilled Charlotte does the commercial stuff,” Delafon says. “That’s not at all my thing. I do it when I have to, and naturally, when it’s your project, and your business, it gets easier. But yeah, that’s not at all my cup of tea.”
Desombre’s physical presence in Paris has also helped the brewery to develop name recognition in the capital, a massive plus for the small, regional business. Delafon, meanwhile, has taken an interest in the production side of things, learning at Munsch’s side, and with help from a brewing course she took in Nancy. Next up? She wants to brew on her own. “With Nathalie next to me, of course, but I’d love to do it alone,” she says. “I’ve never done that before.”
The depth of the friendship at the core of this business is the river running through it. When Desombre comes to Grenoble or Delafon goes to Paris, they often stay at the other’s house. They have a special Slack channel just for them. “It has not ruined our friendship. On the contrary,” says Desombre. “Today, we know each other so much better than we did before.”
“When we see one another, we talk about work,” Delafon says, noting that going into business with a friend was certainly “a risk,” and one that many in their inner circle warned them about. “But at the same time, we’re driven by the same core values,” she says. “We didn’t do this to create a startup and amass a huge amount and then sell afterwards. This project was really born of a desire to change things, to act, to see what we could do a little bit differently. And that’s what’s always driven us.”
Despite their sustainable goals, the friends have experienced some criticism for their choice to be in the brewing industry at all, due to concerns over water use as well as transport, shipping, and sourcing. “People say, ‘You call yourselves environmentalists, but you make beer,’” says Delafon. “But at the same time, beer is a drink that’s existed since antiquity; we’re not going to stop drinking it.”
The enemy of the good, in this case, really does seem to be perfection. And they do endeavor to be better every day. There is talk of setting up their own brewhouse so that they can better optimize water use, recycle spent grain, wash and reuse bottles, and even tap into solar energy for their electricity needs. They hope to source hops from an Alsatian supplier currently in organic transition, and to buy even more of their malts locally, thanks to a burgeoning market.
“We started working with a local malthouse,” explains Delafon, noting that, given the added technical challenge of their bread-based recipes, it has thus far been difficult to transition entirely away from their Belgian producer to the regional supplier. “We’re doing more tests with them,” she says. “The idea is to encourage the sector to develop. If no one plays along, it won’t work.”
They are also passionate about integrating a system of redistributing glass bottles, which they tried on a pilot basis last year, collecting and washing 2,000 in the nearby Drôme in collaboration with an organization called Ma Bouteille S’Appelle Revient. “They’ve got a real washing facility,” says Desombre. “But today, it’s the biggest one nearby. And so we’d need to send our bottles there, wash them, and then bring them back.” They have hopes for a second, similar project in nearby Chambéry, and a new washing facility on the outskirts of Paris.
Delafon notes that this bottle project is one of her major priorities, alongside outsourcing the crumbing of the bread to a welfare-to-work program called ULISSE. Beginning in June, when renovation works to better accommodate the project have been completed, Ribeiro will deliver the bread directly to their facility.
No matter how far they go, the friends remain linked to their roots, perhaps best exemplified by their mascot, Coco the hummingbird, who appears on each bottle carrying a sprig of wheat in its beak. The double “co” in Cocomiette evokes both écologie and copines: the friends at the company’s core. “There’s really a lot living in that little ‘co,’” says Desombre.
The image itself evokes the Quechuan legend of the hummingbird who, during a forest fire that the other animals watch in horror and disbelief, begins taking little drops of water from a nearby stream, transporting them one by one on the tip of its beak in an attempt to extinguish the flames. When mocked by the other animals, the hummingbird says, “I am doing the best I can.”
“Since the beginning, we’ve recycled a bit more than six tons of bread,” says Desombre. “That’s nothing. That’s a drop in the sea of unsold bread in France. But it’s still our little step.”
Words by Emily MonacoPhotos by Eileen Cho
