Audition d'Emmanuel Besnier, PDG du groupe Lactalis , en commission des Affaires Économiques

On the outsourcing, I have always known that in the Lactalis group, for pathogens, we have always outsourced the analyses. The samples are taken by our teams, but the analyses themselves and the samples are sent to an external laboratory. And for pathogens, the analyses have been done for as long as I can remember, at least 20 years, by external laboratories. Regarding the milk producers, we have held hearings... Could you repeat your question?

So, our primary objective, our first reason for being, is the health safety of our products. It is our primary responsibility. To guarantee it, we must verify all our environments and all our processes. This is what the health control plan defines. Within the health control plan, we establish a risk analysis, which is called the HACCP plan. This allows us to ask ourselves, at each step of the process, what the risks of contamination are in terms of bacterial contamination, chemical contamination, or contamination by foreign bodies. All these steps are thought through and studied with the employees of the ten plants to define this plan. And this plan is submitted to the supervisory authority, that is, the DGCCRF in each department. And it is the DGCCRF that authorizes us, based on these analyses we provide, to proceed with production with a health approval. So the entire self-check process is validated there; it is not done randomly. Added to this is a training plan that we establish at the group level, because as I told you earlier, across 80 plants—78 plants, sorry—we have more than 150 employees who every day, in all the plants, go to take samples with a wipe, collect swabs, etc. So we have a whole approach aimed at tracking the pathogenic bacteria. If we don't track it, we don't find it. If we don't find it, we can't define action plans. And it is truly a plan implemented plant by plant, process by process, because the risk levels differ from one site to another. And it is the site operators—I believe Madame Deflesselles, whom you heard a few weeks ago, insists on this point—it is very difficult to entrust to an external party the control and management of our process. We have controls over our entire procedure, but the control itself, the sampling, is carried out by our employees. As for the milk producers, we informed them fairly quickly, either through a note to all producers. Then there were a number of meetings, either between our teams and the milk producers locally. But from the very beginning of the crisis, we wrote to and met with the milk producers to tell them there would be no problem, no issue related to this crisis. Regarding the other controls, you can imagine that a large part of the report will focus on this subject. It is by no means about outsourcing all controls, which would disempower the industrialist—that would be ridiculous. On the other hand, it is also about reviewing the state's resources, which have decreased very significantly, and the controls. So we will think about it, and Grégory and all the parliamentarians who will be involved, but disempowering the industrialist would be ridiculous. Increasing the state's resources a bit—we could have a little more, because they are having great difficulties. The person who works in Mayenne, for example, during this crisis, all state services were mobilized to make it go as smoothly as possible. But there was a second crisis at the same time, it was a catastrophe, so they are really at their limit. And in our proposals, that's what we'll see. But the problem of self-checks and also environmental self-checks, which I mentioned earlier, is also something that we need to think about every day.