Microplantes opens talks on a Val-d’Oise production site

Microplantes has opened initial discussions with local actors in the Val-d’Oise about investing in a production site in the département. The discussions are exploratory. No agreement is signed, no site is confirmed, and no timetable is set. We are publishing this note at that stage rather than later, because an unexplained silence gets filled in by guesswork.

Where the project stands

Our laboratory is at Boissy-l’Aillerie, in the Val-d’Oise. The conversations now underway are about whether a larger production site in the same département makes sense: what land would be needed, what the workforce would look like, what phasing would be realistic, and who locally would be involved. Those are the questions being asked. None of them has an answer yet.

The ambition, if it goes ahead, is a facility that grows to more than 100 people. That is the scale the project is designed around, not a number anyone has committed to. There is no hiring plan, no recruitment window, and no headcount schedule behind it.

Why the Val-d’Oise

The first reason is simply that the laboratory is already there, with the people who run it. The second is that Île-de-France is the country’s largest consumption basin, which shortens the distance between a plant leaving an acclimatation greenhouse and the operation that plants it. The third is that the département is currently the site of the largest public agri-food development project in the region.

Agoralim, described accurately

Agoralim is carried by Semmaris — the company that operates the Rungis international market — at the request of the State, under the Plan Val-d’Oise. It is a multi-site programme across four communes in the département: Gonesse for agricultural production, vegetable processing and training; Goussainville for the producers’ trading floor and distribution; Roissy-en-France for a central kitchen and processing; Bonneuil-en-France for last-mile logistics.

Goussainville is the first site, on a plot of about 38 hectares with 115,000 to 120,000 m² of floor area, which Semmaris says would generate around 1,500 direct jobs. The Prefect of the Val-d’Oise qualified Agoralim as a projet d’intérêt général on 16 October 2024, following a public consultation held from 10 July to 9 September 2024, and a declaration of intent was published on 3 April 2025. Semmaris’s published timeline puts the start of development works at 2027 and delivery of the first tranche at 2029.

French press coverage routinely calls Agoralim a "second Rungis" — the phrasing appears in headlines at Réussir Les Marchés, in Usine Nouvelle, and elsewhere. Its promoters do not use it. Semmaris’s own materials describe Agoralim as complementary to the Rungis market rather than as a duplicate of it. We use their framing, and flag the other as press shorthand.

The relevance is therefore economic rather than logistical. A département that is being organised around fresh food, processing and short supply chains is a département where upstream plant production has a reason to sit. That is the argument being tested in the discussions, and testing it is what the discussions are for.

What is not decided

• No agreement has been signed with any partner, public or private.
• No site has been selected, optioned or acquired.
• No planning application has been filed.
• No hiring has started and no recruitment timetable exists.
• No production capacity has been committed to any customer on the basis of this project.

Our published target of approximately 10 million vitroplants a year remains what it has always been: capacity at full build-out across four production lines, reached in steps, subject to demand and to investment in growth rooms, transfer stations and greenhouse area. This project would be one of those steps. It is not a change to the target, and it is not evidence that the target has been met.

What happens next

More conversations, and the ordinary work of turning an intention into a costed plan. If something is decided, we will publish it here with the same amount of detail we have used to describe the uncertainty. Until then, this is the whole of it.