GETTING TO KNOW THE COLLECTION
THE MUSEUM AND ITS COLLECTIONS HISTORY
To create The House of The Laughing cow, the project leaders gathered an exceptional collection from the company archives, Léon Bel’s family personal collection and from passionate private collectors’ collections. Among them,Gilbert Bonin, a former worker in Bel dairies, to whom we owe more than half of the exhibited objects between 2009 and 2017.
Since the opening, The House of The Laughing cow continued to collect, expanding endlessly its collections through auction sales or from private individual propositions. In 2016, Les Fromageries Bel moved their head office from Paris to Suresnes, leading to what we called the SUPERTRI (SUPER-SORTING) : this big harvest among all the employees allowed to save many hundred objects, some of them which were forgotten at the bottom of cabinets for decades…
PERMANENT EXHIBITION
The new House of The Laughing cow now presents its historical collections in a emblematic part of the site : the former cellars in which were ripened the cheese rolls used for the first Laughing cow tin starting in 1921. A historical place, the cellars are now highlighted to benefit the brand and the group history.
A boxes and labels frieze from 1921 to nowadays tours the two cellars, whereas six central blocks represent six key eras of this history :
1865-1914 : La saga (The saga)
1914-1926 : La création (The creation)
1926-1939 : Les années folles (The golden years)
1940-1970 : La conquête (The conquest)
1970-1985 : L’expansion (The expansion)
1985-nowadays : On est tous Vache qui rit (We all are Laughing cow)
THE CONSERVATION CENTRE
In 2016, The House of The Laughing cow acquired a brand new Conservation Centre, in a building adjacent to the tour spaces. Using two floors of this building, it consists of two distincts spaces :
>a zone dedicated to the work of objects in transit : cleaning, inventorying, digitalising, labelling, packaging…
>a storage zone where the objects are conserved in the best conditions. A mobile shelving system offers 240 meters of shelf space, completed by painting grids for our frames and furniture for unframed posters.
