ID Luce launches the production of plywood for food use – Le Journal des Entreprises – Maine-et-Loire
One million Euros. This is the amount that ID Luce, an Angevin company which manufactures plywood for packaging and boxes for furniture storage (which account for almost half of its activity) has just invested, under the impetus of its manager. Christophe Delayre, in new equipment to produce plywood for food use. Activist for the maintenance and development of industrial activity in the countryside, this engineer from Supélec and former executive in a large American group, had taken over at the helm of the court in 2019 the company Luce with all of its 15 employees, in the small village of Vernoil-le-Fourrier, and had renamed it ID Luce, for “Sustainable Industry”. A course of action that the SME intends to follow.
A clientele in the West
“We are going to produce in France what is made in Spain”, rejoices the manager of ID Luce, which achieves around 1.5 million in turnover with today 17 employees. “Until now we have been manufacturing plywood, which we sell in slabs within a radius of around 100 kilometers for the manufacture of industrial packaging. We have also opened a four-person site in Brain-sur-Allonnes for the manufacture of boxes in kits intended for the whole of France. They are then assembled on site by our customers and we can also go and do it on site. We will now have a space dedicated to plywood for the food industry”, explains Christophe Delayre.
The SME built a building and equipped itself with a new production line meeting the specific requirements of the sector, particularly in the sanitary field. It targets customers in a western quarter of France, an area stretching approximately from Brittany to Charente: “The plywood will be sold to manufacturers of food packaging, such as trays or crates, who themselves distribute to producers of cheese, strawberries and more generally the food industry. We are counting on around twenty customers and we have potentially listed around thirty of them. Many were waiting for plywood produced in France.”
A compostable and reusable plywood
The Angevin company will create ten jobs with this new production and plans to more than double its activity. “We should exceed 3 million euros in turnover,” predicts Christophe Delayre. The wood, like that which supplies all of ID Luce’s activity, will be sourced in the region, a maximum of a hundred kilometers away, and the manager, for environmental reasons, does not plan to extend his clientele beyond of the geographical perimeter that it has set itself. If the need arose, he would prefer, he confides, to install another unit closer to his customers. “The plywood that we are going to manufacture will be compostable, adds Christophe Delayre. The objective is also to make it reusable and that it continues to turn in the sector.” ID Luce will start manufacturing its food-grade plywood in the next few weeks. The company, which will soon approach a workforce of around thirty people, should produce around 10% of the national market.
