Pur Coop is a cooperative production company (SCOP) that offers 100% plant-based cuisine. It was created in 2022 after 13 employees bought out the former company Pur etc., which was created in 2011. Pur Coop now runs three restaurants in Strasbourg and a central kitchen offering meal deliveries to companies in France.
Pur Coop’s mission is to “change the world with a fork” by offering 100% plant-based food. The founders of the cooperative are passionate about protecting animals and about the preservation of the environment and public health.
“The globalized and intensive livestock and fishing industry […] has lost all humanity in 50 years and causes great and intolerable animal suffering by contributing jointly to the death of natural and peasant agriculture, the destruction of forests, and the pollution of soils, oceans and air” explains the SCOP on its website.
The cooperative offers only vegan dishes made with organic or local products. It revisits the classics of French and international cuisine such as burgers, paella, kebabs, scallop risotto, fish and chips, and Cantonese rice. The founders of Pur Coop want to win over gourmets by proving that plant-based cuisine is not lacking in flavor.
A cooperative enterprise of employees
Pur Coop is a cooperative enterprise of employees, a SCOP. The employee partners bought the company to save their jobs and to give a new lease of life to their activity. They are all involved in the management and development of the company, they share the profits and make decisions together.
This form of enterprise allows the employees to reconcile economic performance, social utility and respect for the environment.
Dishes prepared in a central kitchen
The dishes offered by Pur Coop are prepared in a central kitchen located in the Krutenau district of Strasbourg. They are cooked with organic or local products and are transported by cargo bike to the three restaurants that the cooperative manages in Strasbourg.
The locations entail Origin, a café; Paradise, which offers street food; and La Bouture, a plant-based canteen. The cooperative also offers meal deliveries to companies that wish to offer a plant-based diet to their employees.
Willy Berton, one of the employees associated with Pur Coop, is an experienced cook in plant-based cuisine. He is very inventive when it comes to creating dishes using culinary techniques to reproduce the textures and flavors of traditional dishes.
“I do trompe-l’oeil! At first glance, the customer doesn’t see that it’s vegetarian cuisine. The fish and chips, for example, is an eggplant fritter marinated in iodized water. The customers taste it and find it very good. We tell them afterwards that it is vegan, it works better in that sense,” explains Berton.
