Mots Maudits #6 : Filière

Research suggests that 3 in 5 consumers worldwide want to learn more about where their food comes from and how it is made. Conscious of this, food industry players have long strived to guarantee food safety and boost consumer confidence through traceability programmes and quality assurance schemes. In France — where consumers are fairly sensitive to quality labels due to the abundance of long-standing geographical certifications for wine, and butter, among others — this is commonly described in industry jargon using the word “filière”, which may seem somewhat opaque to an anglophone.

In the context of food production, “filière” refers to all the steps of a production process that lead from the creation of the raw materials to the distribution of the finished product. As a general rule, it can be translated as “sector”, “industry”, “supply chain” or “value chain”, as in “la filière orge-malt-bière” (the barley-malt-beer chain) or “la filière de transformation blé” (the wheat processing industry).

When stakeholders refer to an “esprit de filière” or “synergies filières”, this can be translated in terms of commercial arrangements or even vertical integration: growers develop mutually beneficial partnerships with downstream processing and distribution companies to ensure commercial opportunities and quality, respectively.

In the context of quality assurance schemes, “filière” is also used as a modifier to convey the notion of specific supply agreements. For example, “contrats filières” refers to programmes (like the “filière LU Harmony" and "Nestlé Préférence") where food manufacturers sign supply agreements with farmers to encourage them to adopt eco-friendly farming methods. Such programmes are win-win: the farmers get assurances of a certain sales volume at a guaranteed (generally advantageous) price, and the food companies get assurances regarding the regularity of supply and the quality of the raw materials they source, as well as an ability to communicate on it.

As for how exactly to translate these terms, it will depend on the context (the specifics of the companies involved and the details of their commercial arrangements). However, in such cases, it may not be possible to match the brevity of the French source text due to the semantic and cultural baggage associated with the word “filière”; consider rephrasing the sentence in order to faithfully convey the original meaning.