Barely two years after the creation of her cheese factory, Manon Thomas unexpectedly won a gold medal at the Lyon International Competition. She spoke to La Dépêche du Midi.Â
Barely two years after launching her cheese factory “Lait 2 Brunes”, Manon Thomas saw her work rewarded on the international stage. Indeed, this producer and breeder won a gold medal at the Lyon International Competition, one of the largest agri-food competitions in Europe, which brings together several thousand products each year evaluated by nearly 1,000 international jurors.
An unexpected reward for the breeder and producer based in Pujols, who had registered her Le Brun cheese at the Cantalou heart in the hope of obtaining an outside perspective on her work and advice on perfecting her products.
“I told my mother I wanted to make cheese”
“It’s quite a recognition, especially since I’ve been processing for very little time,” she explains. If breeding has been part of the family history for several generations, Manon Thomas’ journey has taken a more unique path.
After obtaining her nursing assistant diploma, the young woman decided to change direction. “I told my mother that I wanted to make cheese. I then left for Aurillac, in Cantal, where I trained for two years in dairy processing.” The young Ariège resident will then obtain her BPREA (professional agricultural business manager certificate) and return to the family farm to process the milk from her cows, Brunes des Alpes.
“A nutty aroma and a buttery taste”
Raised on the farm (the Gaec de Lakanal), its dairy cows provide milk that Manon describes as particularly rich and digestible: “Our cows produce milk that is particularly rich in fat and protein. To give you an idea, a standard whole raw milk displays generally around 38 g of fat and 32 g of protein per liter. With our Brunes, we reach in winter almost 50 g of fat and 40 g of protein.
In a cheese factory, it’s a treat to transform it.” A raw material which gave birth to a soft cheese, Brun au Cœur Cantalou, rewarded at the Lyon International Competition. This can be tasted “from three weeks of maturation but reveals its full potential between a month and a month and a half”. When tasting, the cheesemaker says she finds “a hazelnut aroma” as well as “the buttery taste of fat” characteristic of the milk produced by her herd.
“Luckily we’re family.”
The family farm has around sixty dairy cows, as well as a few sheep and pigs, fed thanks to the 132 hectares cultivated by the farm. Established since 2021 alongside her mother, with whom she is associated, Manon Thomas was recently able to hire her partner thanks to the development of the cheese factory. A success driven by the whole family: “I still have my grandfather who is there to support us, to direct us, an Inspector Gadget as you could say. And the help of my father too. It’s truly a family business. I have my two aunts who help me run the shop because I am sorely short of time.”
A collective involvement which gives even more value to this medal. “Having a dairy farm is a daily job: there are no weekends or public holidays, it’s a lot of working hours. It’s also recognition of the work that my family accomplished before I set up.”
