Sustainability
in our cooperative
At Sodiaal, we believe in the future of milk and in the strength of the collective to meet tomorrow’s food, environmental and regional challenges.
As France’s leading dairy cooperative, we support our 13,000 farmers towards ever more sustainable practices.
On our farms. In our plants.
Across the whole country.
At Sodiaal,
sustainability is lived
and built every day, collectively.
Our cooperative is committed
4 pillars
and a shared ambition
A cooperative of 13,900 farmers and 9,000 employees, Sodiaal accounts for almost 20% of French milk collection.
We are one of the major players in the dairy sector, with operations all across France.
Our cooperative model allows us to reinvest the value we create to support our farmers, transform our activities and meet tomorrow’s challenges. From the farm to the finished product, we act across the entire value chain.
Profitability and sustainability go hand in hand: they carry equal weight in every one of our decisions, so that we can support our farmers, make the necessary investments and co-finance, together with our entire ecosystem,
the transformations that will shape the future of our cooperative.
Our farms and farming practices
#1 Supporting every farm in its transition towards more sustainable, high-performing livestock farming models
With more than 7,000 farms of all kinds, our challenge is to strengthen their resilience.
Helping every farming model make progress
Our dairy advisers, trained and deployed across the country, support each farmer with tailored advice and solutions. By rolling out these tools on a large scale, we are transforming today’s practices while preparing tomorrow’s.
Around 2,700 carbon assessments (CAP2ER) carried out since 2019.
Creation of the Sustainability Bonus (in 2024, a first in France), worth up to €5 per 1,000 litres: 62% of eligible farms have received it.
84% of our farms have a “Superior” or “Excellent” animal welfare score.
Investing and innovating to reduce our impact
24 pilot farms testing the effectiveness of innovative solutions in real-life conditions.
Innovations tested on these pilot farms with partners such as Agriculture du Vivant and CDC Biodiversité, to trial tomorrow’s farming models that reconcile economic performance, carbon and biodiversity.
Our Sodiaal Transitions partnership offer provides collective financing solutions to accelerate the agri-food transition and reduce the Scope 3 carbon footprint of our client partners.
Our production activities
#2 Transforming our activities to secure their long-term future and competitiveness
Reducing the impact of our activities by prioritising our investments
Energy and process optimisation: biomass boiler, trucks running on biofuel (Oleo100), ISO 14001 roll-out in some of our plants, etc.
Optimised water use: a common cleaning standard across our plants, water recovery, high-performance equipment and continuous process optimisation.
Logistics optimisation: reducing the impact of our logistics by optimising flows and equipping ourselves with measurement tools.
Reducing the impact of packaging with a circular economy approach
Designing packaging compatible with existing recycling channels and helping new recycling channels scale up.
Using less packaging, prioritising the reduction of fossil-based plastic and taking part in collective initiatives working on new packaging concepts.
Our dairy products
#3 Innovating to offer dairy products that meet the expectations of tomorrow’s food
From the nutritional quality of our products to reducing their environmental impact, we develop dairy products that are good, safe, varied and affordable, meeting consumer expectations while raising our standards for nutrition and naturalness.
Addressing nutritional and environmental challenges
100% French dairy products.
A dairy product for every taste, thanks to a broad portfolio of varied flavours.
Continuous improvement of our products’ nutritional profile, with priority given to reducing sugar.
Simpler recipes: removing additives wherever possible.
Roll-out of a management tool that assesses, before launch, the potential nutritional and environmental impacts of any new or reformulated product.
Measurement tools to assess products’ carbon scores.
Regular monitoring of nutritional quality through indicators tracked over time.
Choosing sustainable supply chains for our ingredients
Converting our priority ingredients to responsible supply chains through our certifications: Fairtrade for our cocoa sourcing (fair trade) and RSPO (responsible palm oil production).
Risk mapping of our purchases (direct and indirect) to identify priority issues.
Roll-out of certifications and measurement tools demonstrating the strength and robustness of our approach, such as EcoVadis, RFAR and ISO 20400.
Our collective: farmers, employees, clients and partners
#4 Mobilising our collective to engage our ecosystem and secure the future of our cooperative
Together with our collective, we are building solutions that reconcile sustainability, economic performance and food sovereignty.
Supporting farmers as their profession evolves
Support for new generations of farmers with the Sodiaal box: financial aid, personalised follow-up and more.
Creation of the Happy Box (relief cover support, better conditions for welcoming people on farms, and training).
Help recruiting farm employees: “Cap sur l’emploi laitier”.
A network of 70 trained dairy advisers present across the country.
Being a collective committed to the transition
Employee engagement and training: mandatory Sustainability e-learning for all new employees, Climate Fresk, 2T workshop.
A sustainability index built into managers’ variable pay, on a par with the cooperative’s financial performance.
Signing of a Sustainable Linked Business Plan (SLBP) with Carrefour, showing our collective’s ability to rally clients, farmers and employees around shared sustainability goals: climate, nutrition and responsible packaging.
Events such as “Le Champs des Rencontres”, which let consumers discover farms, Sodiaal’s cooperative model and its commitments.
Our 2030 targets
and key results
-50%
carbon
footprint
on our scopes 1 and 2 (plants and collection)
compared with 2019
By 2030 vs. 2019: -23%*
-20%
gross carbon
footprint
per litre of milk
by 2030 compared with 2019
By 2030 vs. 2019: -6.7%*
-40%
water
consumption
in our plants compared with 2019
By 2030 vs. 2019: -24%*
100%
recyclable
household
packaging
by 2030, prioritising
the reduction of fossil-based plastic
By 2030 vs. 2019: -90.5%*
1,500
new farmers
over the 2024–2030 period to ensure generational renewal
2025 result: 1,849 new farmers set up since 2019
2,700
CAP’2ER®
assessments
carried out since 2019,
including 400 in 2025
62%
of eligible
farms
received the Sustainability Bonus in 2025
84%
of audited
farms
achieved a “Superior” or “Excellent” animal welfare score, up 3 points in one year.
50%
of our member farms’
utilised agricultural area
is made up of biodiversity-equivalent hectares (permanent grassland and hedgerows)
Manifesto
At Sodiaal, we believe in the future of milk and in the strength of the collective.
Because milk is life. A pillar of our food sovereignty. An ally of good nutrition. Milk is part of our lives and is passed down from generation to generation.
As climate upheavals accelerate, everyone must play their part. It is vital!
Producing better. Producing sustainably. It is not a choice.
It is our responsibility.
As France’s leading dairy cooperative, we act everywhere in France:
on our farms, in our plants, across the whole country.
Our model?
Acting together. Supporting each and every one. Transforming collectively.
At Sodiaal, there is not just 1 farming model. There are 7,000.
7,000 farms. 7,000 realities. 7,000 journeys that we support.
So we invest, we innovate, we make progress.
But let’s be clear-eyed: the transition comes at a cost, and farmers and the cooperative cannot bear it alone. Because the resilience of our farms, our regions and our sector is built collectively. To pay producers better. To preserve resources and biodiversity.
To reduce our environmental footprint. To prepare for the future.
In our cooperative, we do not choose between profitability and sustainability.
We move both forward.
And in the face of challenges, we do not back down.
If solutions exist, we roll them out.
If they don’t, we invent them.
We test. We adjust. We accelerate.
As we always have:
Together
