Chocolat Menier

Tourists to France and chocolate lovers everywhere know this beloved icon:  a little girl in a red and blue pinafore, writing on a

yellow wall using a piece of chocolate, advertising the brand, Menier chocolate.   This famous little figure turns up on candy tins, mugs, pitchers, posters and other artifacts, is a staple at flea markets and antique stores, and decorates many a wall worldwide.

Founded in 1816 by Antoine Brutus Menier, the Menier chocolate factory initially produced chocolate as a medicinal powder to coat the bitter tasting pills that Menier, a pharmacologist, sold.  Soon, however, the demand for the chocolate outpaced the medicines, so the Menier family purchased a small water mill in the town of Noisiel, twenty kilometers east of Paris, to produce cocoa powder.  The factory was revamped and modernized to facilitate assembly, and became the first factory in France to mass produce the powder by machines.

Menier then introduced blocks of chocolate (les tablettes) wrapped in yellow paper.  To keep up with production, the company began to concentrate on the exclusive production of chocolate products – it had cocoa growing estates in Nicaragua, sugar beet fields and a sugar refinery in the area of Roye, France.  Before long, the Menier Chocolate Company was the largest chocolate manufacturer in France, whose production necessitated a larger factory.

With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, the Menier factory revamped and extended the factory  in Noisiel with the newest materials, reflecting a boldness of design, considered today a National Heritage Site and is “one of the iconic buildings of the Industrial Revolution” (Archtectural Review, February 1997).

Resting on four stone piers that were sunk into the river bed, the chocolate factory is built on square hollow sections that feature an

exposed metal frame and diagonal pillar reinforcements that form a lattice. Yellow bricks filled in the latticework, some glazed to form cocoa flowers for decoration, others, when viewed from afar, formed the letter M.  Another building in the factory complex was designed and built by Gustave Eiffel for the Universal Exposition of 1898, taken apart and reassembled in Noisiel for the purpose of cooling the chocolate.  More additions to the plant were made later, including a major building that used reinforced concrete and was nicknamed “the Cathedral”.  One last innovation was the Pont Hardi, a 142 foot long concrete bridge that spans the Marne River, linking the new building to other parts of the complex.

At peak production around the turn of the 20^th century, the chocolate factory employed over 1500 people, but World Wars I and II hurt production, and the Menier brand declined. Ultimately, the brand was sold to Nestlé S.A.  Nestlé’s French headquarters are housed in the main building of the Menier chocolate factory, while other parts of the original complex house a chocolate museum.