You’ve probably already eaten one of their products. Tabbouleh, salads, grated carrots but also quiches or pizzas… In the car, on a picnic or on the go, its preparations have become essential. Perhaps you didn’t know that behind these well-known recipes lies an entrepreneur and a group of the same name: Pierre Martinet. The latter has just announced, to his great regret, that he will not be able to pass on the family business to his daughter. How did he start and where does this nickname “intractable caterer” come from?
First an apprentice at 14, then a self-employed butcher at 21, in Ain, this son of farmers began his career as an entrepreneur in the 1960s. At the start of the following decade, he experienced his first success with a recipe: beef snout salad, as he reported to France 3 Regions in a portrait dedicated to him in 2019. “I traveled around the world to find snouts because I lacked merchandise, it “There weren’t enough in France,” says the main person concerned at the microphone of the television channel.
In 1980, he set up in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier (Isère), not far from Lyon and launched his international expansion, with the first products sold in Switzerland and Belgium in 1981. He would later develop his brand in Canada, Brazil, in Spain…
It was at the end of the 1980s that he began to market what would become his big “hit”: an oriental tabbouleh recipe. And a few years later, in 1994, he appeared in a television advertisement, and adopted the famous slogan of “intractable caterer”. He took the title of an autobiography published by Plon in 2020: L’Intraitable.
In the 1990s, he also fulfilled a passionate dream by becoming president of the Bourgoin-Jailleu rugby sports club (of which he was already a sponsor), a position he held until 2009.
His group now has more than 700 employees and produces some 80,000 tonnes of products per year. Quinoa, bulgur, lentils… its laboratories are getting up to date and now offer a whole range of products based on various seeds and vegetables.
He is also one of those producers distributed in supermarkets who have joined forces with big names in gastronomy, in this case, that of chef Guy Savoy.
This father of 5 children, who until then worked with his wife Nurdan, finally decided to retire. “It does something (…) I am going to celebrate my 77th birthday. My daughter (aged 24) is not ready to take over,” he confided to France Bleu Isère. It entered into exclusive negotiations with the LDC group, Lambert Dodard Chancereul, another French family group, specialist in chicken (Loué, Le Gaulois etc.) in May 2024.
