Deux Bouts: growing opportunities through sustainable market gardening

At the farm, participants gradually reconnect with the routines and expectations of professional life. Internships, training, and job application support are combined with assistance addressing health, mobility, administrative, or financial challenges. Every effort is made to remove the barriers that can prevent a successful return to employment.

Beyond developing technical skills, the program also helps participants rebuild their self-confidence, regain a regular working routine, develop teamwork skills, and become familiar again with the expectations of the workplace.

While the salaries of employees participating in the integration program are funded through public schemes, the organization’s financial sustainability also depends on funding for its supervisory and support teams. Foundation Unlimited contributes by supporting the organization’s operating costs, particularly positions dedicated to its development, while also investing in agricultural equipment.

The farm promotes living-soil market gardening and environmentally responsible agricultural practices. Each year, more than 30 varieties of organic vegetables are grown.

The produce is then sold through short supply chains to private customers, gourmet restaurants, mainly Michelin-starred establishments, as well as collective catering operators. This activity contributes to promoting healthier, more local, and more sustainable food.

Faced with growing demand and seeking to strengthen its economic model, Deux Bouts is now preparing for a new phase of development. Its current farmland does not provide sufficient capacity to fully meet the needs of collective catering while maintaining competitive economic conditions.

The organization is therefore working on a new model that will increase production capacity, mechanize certain activities, and support its continued growth while remaining true to its agroecological and social values.

Ahead of launching the project and securing suitable land, the farm is seeking to develop new local partnerships to co-design this solution. The objective is to strengthen its presence within collective catering, particularly in middle and high schools, nursing homes, and corporate restaurants.

The ambition is to create a genuine local ecosystem, bringing together social and solidarity economy organizations, private companies, local authorities, research centers, training organizations, and other stakeholders to develop an innovative market gardening and social project serving local collective catering.

Together, these partners will be able to address key challenges such as seasonality, crop rotation, sustainable food, product sizing, storage, processing, delivery, and pricing.

Once the project has been piloted, this new phase of development will also support a strong social ambition: the creation of a second integration scheme, an employment integration company, designed to welcome additional participants interested in careers in market gardening.

This future production hub dedicated to collective catering will create continuity between the existing work integration program and the new employment integration company. Participants will be able to develop their skills within the first program before further professionalizing their experience within the second.

It will also create a genuine virtuous circle, where public and private funding supports Deux Bouts and its employees in producing food for us, our children, and our seniors.

The next steps have already been identified:

• Validation of the project by the stakeholders involved by the end of 2026;
• Signature of multi-year agreements with collective catering partners by the end of 2026;
• Acquisition of the land and development of the new farm in 2027;
• Purchase of equipment, planting of trees and hedges, soil preparation, and installation of irrigation systems;
• Launch of the first crops in 2028.

By supporting Deux Bouts, Foundation Unlimited contributes to a project that brings together professional integration, sustainable agriculture, and local development, demonstrating that lasting social and environmental value can be created for the common good.