From Making the Rich Richer to Making Meals: Christine Merckelbagh on Dignity and Work

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Christine Merckelbagh, co-founder and managing director of Label Gamelle. Merckelbagh spent twenty years in large corporations, at AXA, Crédit Agricole and Generali, before leaving to build a social enterprise that does two things at once. It cooks meals from food that would otherwise go to waste, and it gives homeless people and refugees their first real job in France. The full conversation is available to watch below.

From the insurance desk to the kitchen

Merckelbagh trained as a statistician and, like many people, took the job she could get rather than the one she wanted. She built a career inside an insurance company, and for years one thought sat underneath the work. Her job, as she saw it, came down to making rich people richer. Living in Paris and passing people starving on the street, she found she could no longer stand it.

Giving a euro here and there changed nothing, except perhaps how she felt for a moment. So she decided to stop being sad and act. She went back to school to learn to cook, trained at the culinary school Ferrandi, and met a chef who became a close friend. They agreed on a starting principle. Being poor does not mean you should have to eat badly. In 2020 they founded Label Gamelle.

What a cooperative really means

Simone asked her to explain, as he put it, like he was three years old, what a cooperative company is. Merckelbagh's answer was clear. A cooperative trades like any other company, but it has no shareholders. The business belongs to the people who work in it, and so does the money it makes. Governance is democratic, one person one vote, and only the people working in the company are its partners.

She was blunt about what that means for her. She created the company, but it does not belong to her, and she will never get rich from it. That is not the point. The point is that everyone has a job, everyone can live with dignity, and the value the business creates is shared.

Two missions, one kitchen

Label Gamelle runs on a double mission. The first is to fight food waste. The kitchen turns surplus food into meals for shelters, child welfare services and students in need. The second is integration. The people it hires come from those same shelters.

The scale of the second mission is the striking part. Everyone the cooperative employs is homeless when they arrive. Around seventy percent are refugees, from more than twenty countries, and roughly the same proportion arrive without a word of French. For most of them it is the first real job they have held in France.

So the work starts before the cooking. The team helps each new hire sort out the basics: papers, a bank account, social security, accommodation, and French lessons pitched to whether the person went to school before arriving. People stay up to eighteen months, and never more than two years. By the time they leave, around eight in ten have a flat and a job.

It began in 2020 with six people cooking eighty meals a day. Today the kitchen turns out more than 2,500.

What five years taught her

Asked what the work had taught her about dignity and compassion, Merckelbagh started with her own prejudices. The more she has learned, she said, the more she has had to set them aside.

Her example was small and honest. Early on she banned everyone from speaking English and insisted on French. She soon saw how pointless that was, since the people she was talking to could not yet speak French at all. What struck her was how much she had to change her own mind.

Some of the men arrived having never worked alongside women, and it showed. One of them, at the leaving party the cooperative throws when someone moves on, cooked for everyone and used his speech to apologise to every woman he might have hurt, because it was the first time in his life he had worked with women and he had not known how. Nobody taught him that with a lecture. He learned it by doing the work, next to people who were different from him.

She came back more than once to tolerance. The kitchen brings together many nationalities, men and women, young and old, and it works. Where there is no shared language, she said, you learn to read body language and the small signals. The team has become strikingly agile as a result.

None of this softens the standard. Label Gamelle competes with commercial caterers, so the food has to be good and it has to arrive on time. People are waiting to eat. The cooperative has been profitable since its first year, which is what lets it keep going through inflation and a French political climate she described as no longer very welcoming. She has no intention of stopping. She is, she said, sure she is right.

Technology as a way to be seen

The interview closed on the question HumanX puts to every guest, whether the future is technology and humanity together rather than one set against the other. Merckelbagh uses technology every day, and her examples were practical. Imagine waking up tomorrow in Kabul without a word of Pashto, she said. You would reach for your phone to translate, to make sense of the place, to reach people. Her teams do exactly that. Label Gamelle runs French classes and computer classes, and uses technology for the cooking, the admin and the paperwork a new arrival cannot face alone.

For her, though, technology does something larger than enable. It makes people visible. She pointed to an exhibition the cooperative mounted at the French National Assembly in Paris, a month of photographs of its workers, many taken in front of the Eiffel Tower and sent to families around the world. The people in those pictures are usually the invisible ones. Everybody talks about them, she said, and nobody wants to see them. Giving them a job, a wage and a photograph in front of the Eiffel Tower is one way of handing back the dignity that comes with being seen.