Roquefort: the pioneer of PDO cheeses!

Visit your cheesemongers to celebrate not a thousand years of the king of cheeses, but rather its 100 years of excellence, marked by the designation of origin awarded in 1925 — the ancestor of today’s PDO (Protected Designation of Origin).

For the first time ever, a food product received such protection, aiming to defend this symbol of French gastronomy against countless counterfeits. It was a victory for this blue-veined sheep’s milk cheese from Aveyron, but also for all the producers and farmers in France who can now protect their products made with expertise and rooted in their local terroir.

Today, 45 cheeses benefit from this PDO status, a guarantee of quality and authenticity. From its very beginnings in 1881, the powerful Société Anonyme des Caves, which brought together the producers, made it a mission to build the image of this cheese — with its unique flavor due to the mold Penicillium roqueforti — as a luxury product, with notable success. In short, Roquefort should be to cheese what Champagne is to wine.

And yet, despite this enduring storytelling, consumption has been declining year after year, with a worrying drop of 15% between 2013 and 2023. The industry, which supports 5,000 direct jobs, is determined to turn things around with a clear ambition: to win over younger consumers with this slogan: "Just because it’s 100 years old doesn’t mean it’s too old!"