Even supposing you read fluent French, in a supermarket you will simply be joining those shoppers who huddle over labels, trying to make sense of the ingredients in what they think they want to buy. 

 

A cynic would suggest that supermarket owners are quite content to obfuscate the contents, because it enables them to gloss over the fact that many organic or organic-friendly products are not really what they seem. All the signs are, however, that more and more of their customers are beginning to see through this strategy. What happens increasingly is that supermarkets spend a lot of money in marketing organic produce and setting up “organic-friendly” corners of their stores. They achieve the interest they had hoped for all right, but after a week or two their customers no longer buy from them. Instead, they head for dedicated shops, which are much more forthright about the contents of their produce and able to answer quite complex questions about its advantages.

 

This rather bizarre brand awareness is baffling the marketing experts but giving a real momentum to the sale of organic products, or bio, as they are known in France. Year on year growth of 20% is now quite common and four in every ten French men and women bought an organic product at the start of last year, against one in three twelve months previously.

 

For a long time organic shops, too, were set in their ways. La Vie Claire, shortly to celebrate its sixtieth year, has always been the franchise leader. It did not mind being undercut by Biocoop, the first cooperative organic shop, never likely to become a fashionable place to buy, or even by another long-standing competitor, Naturalia. Now however much smaller shops are multiplying and chipping away at their margins. The number selling organic products is estimated to grow by 20 per cent in the course this year and they will soon be as commonplace in towns as the butcher and the baker.