Abstract
Marie is a food processing company that specializes in fresh ready meals and frozen ready meals. Marie manufactures and commercializes products with the brands Marie, Bocuse, Luang (exotic meals), Weight Watchers (light meals) and also the Uniq group which is a major player of the food processing sector in Europe. Frozen products appeared in 1983 with the brand Marie and in 1985 frozen ready meals were launched. Marie's values are simplicity, trust, respect and enthusiasm. Marie has different customer groups: distribution groups in France (Carrefour, Leclerc, System U, Casino), hard discount sellers, shops specialized in frozen products, catering out of home (collective and commercial), importers and exporters. The turnover was about 435 million Euros in 2007 and Marie sold 83,000 tons of products. There are 1,400 employees in the company. 53% of the products sold are frozen products and 47% are fresh products. 80% of the products are sold to the general public, 10% are sold to catering out of home and 5% of the products are sold to export. The head office is based in Rungis. Innovation is really important in this company and takes place in different ways like new recipes, new concepts, and better flavor to the customer and also better quality of the products. More than 50 new products are launched every year for mass-market retailing,. New products in the market that are less than two years old, contribute to 20% of the turnover. 20 new products are launched per year for catering from home.
