COMITÉ INTERPROFESSIONEL DU GRUYÈRE DE COMTÉ

The comté is a raw milk cheese with a baked pressed cheese. It is handcrafted in the Jura Massif (Doubs, Jura and part of the Ain), and has had the Appellation d'origine contrôlée since 1958 and the Appellation d'origine protégée since 1996.

History. The County Interprofessional Committee was born on June 11, 1963, it was then called "Comité interprofessionnel du Gruyère de Comté", and took its first steps in 1968, when a major societal crisis broke out throughout France. It ensures that consumers' expectations are met in terms of environmental protection, non-industrialized artisanal processes, natural and authentic products. And it allows producers, cheesemakers and ripeners attached to a difficult terroir, the Jura Massif, to exercise a sustainable economic activity, a factor in land use planning and landscape protection.

The Comté sector now includes 2,600 agricultural holdings, more than 150 production workshops, small cheese dairies in villages called "fruitières", and 16 specialised ripening houses: each one according to its site, its cellar atmosphere and its expertise, provides the county with a ripening method that is specific to it and adapted to the cheese it has been delivered.

The products. The county is the first French PDO cheese in terms of tonnage (63,243 T in 2016). A county cheese wheel weighs an average of 40 kg with a diameter of 60 cm and a "heel" (thickness) of 10 cm; it requires an average of eight months of maturing, but the duration can range from 4 to 24 months. 400 litres of milk are needed to make a 40 kg wheel. A Montbéliarde producing about twenty litres in two milkings, so you need the milk of twenty cows to obtain a county cheese wheel, and also twenty hectares of minimum meadow, because each cow benefits from a minimum of one hectare of meadow.

Employment. The number of direct jobs in the County sector is estimated at nearly 7,600. The average annual milk production is about 580 million litres.