After working for many years in various technician jobs in the agriculture and agro-food sector in Brittany, Nicolas Bonnet noticed that some producers experienced difficulties with logistics when trying to make reliable deliveries to local customers, restaurants in particular. He had the idea of providing an interface service between producers and customers, and between different producers.

The purpose of the joint-delivery and joint-storage website of the Coclicaux enterprise established in St. Brieuc, Brittany, is consequently to provide a simple, free service that establishes links between professionals for the pooling of storage facilities and/or transport of merchandise to consumer sites. This approach means their needs are met in terms of logistics and the costs are shared and therefore reduced. Coclicaux is a win-win solution which on the one hand gives producers the option of pooling both the storage of their merchandise and transportation of it to professional clients, and on the other hand offers these professional clients the option of using the network for local procurement, thereby reducing the overall carbon footprint.

With the Coclicaux approach, producers also benefit from active promotion via an interactive map. Producers can raise their profile and publicise their products by including any standards for which they fulfil the requirements. The consumer sites (for users) also give contact details for each producer, so they can easily be contacted for placing orders.

What’s more, Coclicaux wholly satisfies the requirements of the EGALIM (the law on balanced commercial relations in the agriculture and food sector, and healthy, sustainable food accessible to all), in terms of collective catering in particular. The aim of this legislative framework is precisely to respond to the growing demand in French society for ‘better eating’, and the Coclicaux website is a veritable catalogue of where quality local provisions can be found.