The first PEF implementations in the Comté PDO chain
The project involves 7 highly qualified partners: Consorzio tutela Grana Padano, Politecnico di Milano, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Piacenza, Fondazione Qualivita, oriGIn, Enersem and CNIEL
The French Dairy sector, represented by CNIEL and CNAOL are involved in the LIFE TTGG project to increase knowledge and to support the French PDO producers on their objective to reduce their environmental footprint, based on the example of the Comté cheese represented by the CIGC, its interbranch association.
Comté is a famous PDO cheese produced in the Jura Massif area which is made of medium-sized mountain in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté area. 2400 dairy farmers, 140 dairies and 14 refiners constitute the Comté chain to produce this hard pressed cheese that has been refined at least 4 months. As the environment is a growing issue for every sector, the members of the Comté chain are currently working on their specification to propose levers in this order.
All the French dairy sector is involved to find solutions against climate change and for all the other environmental challenges that they face. Their interbranch organisations try to propose tools and methodology to the different actors of the dairy production so they can take into account these new indicators in their strategy. To do so, the members of the project decided to implement the PEF method in the Comté chain.
For this task, they decided to work with ACTALIA which is an Agri-Food Research and Technology Institute with 5 main fields of expertise: Sustainability, Dairy processing, Food safety, Chemical and microbiological analysis, Sensory analysis. Thanks to their competence on the PEF methodology, they developed a data collection plan with a work on the sample necessary to have a fair representation of the Comté chain. This work was made with consistency with the Italian partners of the project with the Grana Padano PDO.
Following this plan, they collected the data at farm, dairy and refiner level. As this approach can be new to some these producers, it was necessary to support them which was an opportunity to sensitize new dairy actors on the environmental issues. Even if the COVID crisis made this step more difficult than expected, these elements helped develop a Life Cycle Inventory and first results presented to the members of the Life TTGG project.
| The Consorzio di tutela and the companies with PDO and PGI production can ask more information by writing to the person in charge of the Politecnico di Milano: pieter.ravaglia@polimi.it. |
Source: Cniel