Mondelez Splits Château-Thierry Biscuits Between Nantes and Opava

Mondelez stopped the last biscuit line at Château-Thierry on 14 November 2025, closing a Belin then LU plant that had baked on a Marne island since 1931. The group cut 61 permanent jobs there by May 2026, opened 27 posts at La Haye-Fouassière in western France, and sent chocolate bars to Opava in Czechia. French biscuit tonnage, the company says, stayed flat.

The Last Aisne Biscuit Left the Line

Thirty-six workers were still on the clock that Friday. They boxed the final run themselves and asked managers not to come onto the floor. David Romedenne, the CFDT delegate, timed the last piece off the belt at 9:35 a.m.

Ça s’est passé dans le calme avec dignité. C’était vraiment la détresse. On a porté nos valeurs jusqu’au bout en travaillant dignement. On a fini à notre façon en partant la tête haute.

David Romedenne, CFDT delegate, Château-Thierry, 14 November 2025

Dismissals for that wave took effect on 28 November 2025. Those staff then entered a job-search leave of 12 to 18 months, with a union-management follow-up commission still sitting. Six Mondelez employees kept coming in through May 2026 to strip the lines.

Mayor Sébastien Eugène, who also sits on the departmental council, called it a black day for Château-Thierry in a note issued as the ovens went cold. He reminded the town that the smell of sweet and salted biscuits had followed schoolchildren since 1931, and that the group had starved the site of money before shutting it.

Where Mondelez Sent the Biscuits

The 31 January 2024 works-council briefing did not read as a retreat from France. Mondelez said it wanted to protect its French cost base in an inflation squeeze, move volume to other group plants, and hold overall French output. The map underneath that claim had three destinations, not one.

WHERE THE BISCUITS WENT

Unions told members that about half the Aisne tonnage would cross the border. Mondelez would not confirm that share while the project was still in talks, but it did name Opava as the plant that would take the chocolate bars, because that factory already ran similar products. Classic Pépito sablés never came off the island line; they still come from the Cestas chocolate biscuit plant in Gironde, which the group calls its European hub for coated biscuits, with about 500 staff, 12 lines and 50,000 tonnes of yearly capacity.

WHAT LEFT THE AISNE LINE

• Pépito bars: Pockitos and Pockitos Maxi Croustillant, not the classic sablé, were listed for Opava.
• Other filled lines: Kango, Guet Apens and Oro Cereal (in part) sat on the same site.
• Regional LU biscuits: Sablé des Flandres, Beurré Nantais and Saint Sauveur were baked in the Aisne even when the name pointed west.

The louder public fight in early 2024 treated the file as a Chicago-to-Czechia dump. That shout skipped the Nantes transfer and the Figolu return from Britain, which is where the company’s “same French volume” claim actually sits.

The Island Plant Was Twice as Costly

Mondelez told staff the Château-Thierry buildings were very old and would need large spending to bring kit and fabric up to date. Production there, it said, cost on average twice as much as at its other European sites, with no path to close the gap. The plant sits in the city centre, on an island held by the Marne, and the group said the layout could not take new lines unless new rooms were built.

WHY THE AISNE SITE LOST

• The cost gap: Output was priced at twice the rest of Mondelez Europe, after years of attempts to trim it.
• The floorplate: Managers said new lines would have needed new buildings, which the island site could not host.
• The buyer search: A 2014 law forced a hunt for a taker; on 25 April 2025 the group told staff and the town that technical limits blocked any going concern.
• The empty promise of kit: New chocolate tanks were still going up when the closure was announced, which is why the mayor said minds had not been prepared.

Eugène had offered land in a business park if the group would keep the jobs in the agglomeration. Mondelez did not take that path. He later called the shutdown a money choice after a long starve of investment, not a technology story, and said it created disgust that biscuits still sell while the local ovens went dark.

Money was not leaving France as a whole. Amélie Vidal-Simi, then president of Mondelez France, told a Senate margins inquiry that the group put 250 million euros in French factories between 2020 and 2025. That pot included 89 million euros to rebuild Jussy in the Aisne after a 2020 fire and 50 million euros at Cestas. More than 30 million euros was pencilled for 2026, in part at La Haye-Fouassière. French store sales sit around 2 billion euros. The island plant was the site that did not get the next cheque.

Nantes Gains the Lines and Figolu

La Haye-Fouassière is LU’s western home, a dry-biscuit works in the Nantes vineyard country. Mondelez pledged €10 million ($10.8 million) there for a new production line and a new packing line, on top of 13 million euros already spent in the years just before the plan. The 27 new posts were to be offered first to Château-Thierry people ready to move house. The state later said a few internal transfers had already been accepted, without publishing a headcount.

Figolu is the other prize on that floor. The fig sandwich was created in Nantes in 1961, ran at La Haye-Fouassière from 1987 at about 1,000 tonnes a year, and was pulled in 2015. A consumer petition brought it back in 2020. Mondelez said that relaunch ran through Burton’s in Britain, first at 1,600 tonnes a year, then about 1,350, sold only in France. Vidal-Simi said in January 2026 that the Aisne closure had let the group fill spare room at La Haye-Fouassière with a line that was by then running, and that Figolu itself was due back there by the end of 2026.

That is the French win inside the file: a western plant that was not full, a heritage biscuit coming home from a contractor, and 27 posts. It is also why Mondelez could say France still mattered while it emptied the Aisne island. Vidal-Simi put it in industrial language. The bakery sat in the middle of town and had little room to grow, she said, and French volumes stayed stable on the new map.

Four Waves Cleared 61 Permanent Jobs

The job-protection deal was signed with all the unions in June 2024 and signed off on 12 July 2024 by DRIEETS Île-de-France, the labour authority that covers the Clamart headquarters. Jocelyn Dessigny, the Aisne MP, had also flagged about 20 temporary workers around the 61 permanent posts. The government answer to him set the calendar in writing.

THE LAYOFF CALENDAR

1. 31 January 2024: Mondelez tells the central works council it will wind the plant down by the end of 2025.
2. 16 February 2024: Unions stage an action day across French Mondelez sites against the closure.
3. June 2024: Unions sign a unanimous job-protection deal; DRIEETS validates it on 12 July 2024.
4. April 2025: Twelve people leave, and on 25 April the group says the buyer search has failed.
5. June 2025: Eleven more leave.
6. 14 November 2025: Baking ends; 30 people are in the November wave, with dismissals on 28 November.
7. May 2026: The last eight permanent posts go, and the six-person strip-out crew finishes.

Those layoffs in four staged waves add to 61. The 2014 Florange law had required a buyer hunt beyond the legal minimum. The firm hired the Oneida consultancy, logged more than 10 marks of interest, and ran site visits. In April 2025 it said several companies had shown early interest, but technical limits blocked a live handover. Talks with the state then moved to a revitalization deal meant to create or fund at least as many jobs as were cut. The government was still describing one serious buyer track in a 1 July 2025 written answer, a lag behind the company’s own April close-out.

Château-Thierry Keeps an Empty Shell

At its height the bakery employed more than 1,000 people and ran as a social hub as well as a plant. LU bought Belin in 1997; Kraft, then Mondelez, later folded the brand into a European biscuit machine. By the shutdown, 61 permanent posts and a thinner ring of temps and contractors were what remained. Novacel, a films group, now employs about 600 people in the town, which Eugène held up as proof the south Aisne is still an industrial place.

Sauf qu’en l’espèce nous mangeons toujours des biscuits ! Le choix fait par le groupe Mondelez de fermer l’usine après l’avoir asséché par manque d’investissements, n’est pas technologique, c’est un choix financier, que l’on ne saurait digérer.

Sébastien Eugène, mayor of Château-Thierry, 14 November 2025

Eric Billain of the CFE-CGC put a logistics sting on the same grievance: biscuits baked in Opava, he said, would travel about 1,200 kilometres back to French shops, and the Aisne line had used regional flour. Packs that once advertised French baking will, on the Pockitos that left, no longer be able to say that.

In November 2025 the town hall was still talking with Mondelez about locking down the empty site and finding a new use. No buyer had taken the ovens. In June 2026, young actors in Château-Thierry staged Dernière fournée, a play about the 94-year bakery. Angéline Delacourt, who directed them, said the first remark after the shutdown was that the town would no longer smell of cakes.