Charles Guyard, edited by Alexandre Dalifard / Photo credit: JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER / AFP 20:09 pm, May 31, 2023

After several years of struggle by environmental defenders, the Bridor factory, which was to settle in Liffré, Ille-et-Vilaine, will not see the light of day. Environmental activists ended up winning the game as the agri-food group Le Duff withdrew its project. A decision that divides the inhabitants of the commune.

Victory for the ecologists. Activists opposed to the establishment of a frozen pastry factory north of Rennes have led a fight of several years. The Bridor factory, which was to settle in Liffré, Ille-et-Vilaine, will not see the light of day. The defenders of the environment ended up winning the game: the agri-food group Le Duff withdrew its project.

"It's a failure"

"Bridor cannot wait ten years to build a new factory." It is with these words that this subsidiary of the giant Le Duff announced at the beginning of this week to give up to set up a production unit in Liffré, north of Rennes. The numerous appeals filed by environmental associations or local residents have therefore defeated a project imagined in 2017. And in the commune, opinions of this turnaround are rather divided.

"It's a shame because economically, it could bring a lot to the town," laments a first resident. For others, the question of employment is problematic because "Bridor is industrial and everything is automated". For a second citizen interviewed, this project was a good initiative, but "it took too much water".

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A major project that Loïg Chesnais-Girard, the president of the Regional Council of Brittany, has nevertheless defended because it responded, according to him, to the demographic and economic needs of the region he chairs. "Somehow, it's a failure. We do not offer jobs without our territories in our rural or semi-rural areas," he told Europe 1. "So yes, we have to work on the environmental balance. We must develop short circuits as much as possible and we must develop agriculture for all with the agri-food industry that makes it possible to offer quality products for all those who work in the country," he insists. On this last point, it was not really the ambition of Bridor, whose products manufactured in Liffré would have been primarily intended for export.