Filet Bleu, an industrial baker in Brittany, just landed a contract with France’s national airline. The manufacturer will produce 17 million sweet and savory shortbread biscuits a year to be served on board Air France-KLM flights. 

Brittany-based Filet Bleu will be producing 770,000 sealed packets of savory shortbread biscuits and 5 million sweet shortbread biscuit packets over a three-year period for Air France. The contract was landed by Agromousquetaires,^[1] a professional group that the industrial baker joined in 1996.

To respond to the call for bids made by the airline in January 2022 and to please passengers’ palates, the firm – which generates €37 million in annual revenue – dreamt up some new recipes. Two kinds of cheese biscuits and one sweet one were invented for the occasion: pure butter biscuits with Beaufort PDO cheese and nutmeg, as well as biscuits with PDO Cantal cheese and Espelette pepper are available on board Air France flights already. Lemon-scented almond biscuits will be available soon, from January 2023. The specifications and standards to be met were very precise: Air France was looking for a brand with positive values whose products are made in France, without palm oil, and would appeal to international travelers. Filet Bleu hit every mark. 

 “Filet Bleu is extremely proud to propose products from our biscuit factory to Air France clients and to have our “Made in Brittany” label travel around the world. Our development team came up with three new shortbread-biscuit products that met the airline’s demands for both taste and quality, with a determination to introduce our know-how and tastes from different regions of France” Jean-Charles Nocera, in charge of the plant-based product center at Agromousquetaires, explains. 

First founded in 1919, in 1950, the “Filet Bleu” biscuit factory became the first industrial bakery in Bretagne, and joined the Mousquetaires Group in 1996. 

With five high-speed production lines, the firm’s factory, near Quimper (Brittany) produces 300 different biscuits for an annual total of 10,000 tons a year, 10% of which is exported to 16 different countries. The main destination markets are the United States, Belgium and Japan.

^[1] The largest retailing symbol group in France, Les Mousquetaires accounts for 58 production units located all over the country.