– Our governance –

Marie Saglio starts with: “I really appreciate French brands and it’s important for me to work on products that have a direct impact on our lives!”

So, which products would she display as “meaningful” in a retrospective of her career? First off, the complete collection of Lesieur oil bottles. They are a source of great pride, as Lesieur was her last position before joining Saipol in April 2024. She spent 6 years as CEO of this French heritage brand, so she greatly appreciates what Avril Group does. At her previous position, achievements include launching responsible oils, Lesieur Ma Popote and acquisition of stakes in the start-ups Hari&Co and Italians do it better. “Feeding people is the noblest of jobs,” she says.

At Avril, the values and solutions applied to Serve the Earth, the company’s purpose, reflect her own values.

Next, she would display the packaging for Boursin. Perhaps her guilty pleasure? Not only that, but a reminder of her early days at Unilever. “I loved working on the marketing of this product,” she says. She would also be sure to include the iconic blue-capped crystal Bic pen. She joined Bic in 2003 as European Marketing Director and was Managing Director of Bic France and Europe from 2008 to 2018.

This diversity of values and expertise, attested to by the Great Place To Work certification, is one that the company intends to promote.

Marie Saglio joined Saipol on 2 April 2024 to direct the company.

Her role on the Management Committee is to continue to implement the company’s strategy and promote Saipol’s brands and businesses.

Pascal Boquet remembers very clearly the day when he joined the Avril Group, in April 2015. At the time, he was the head of his own transition management consultancy firm, which focused on large chemical and oil groups. He was attracted by the challenge: how to reposition a company operating in a mass market into a supplier of speciality products open to diversification? Succeeding in facing up to such a challenge cannot be possible without the women and men who make up the company. He relied on his expertise, built up since the 1990s within the Manpower group, and then with major stakeholders of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. His creed? Relying on social dialogue to set the agenda, to give meaning to everyone’s work in order to empower teams.

His role within the Management Committee is to ensure that the company has the human and organisational resources to achieve its objectives and to ensure that everyone can flourish.

From fine chemistry to heavy chemistry, then green chemistry, Ludovic Boulais’ career path is much more than a question of chemistry. He joined Saipol in August 2021 and applies the constant: Pq² = Sp²+Slr². Independent of the periodic table of chemical elements, it means that production quality (Pq²) is guaranteed thanks to the safety of people (Sp²) and the safety of local residents (Slr²) squared. This formula structures his commitment and guides his career. During his studies, he saw himself in charge of safety and maintenance at an industrial site, preferably one with continuous activity and a high threshold Seveso. His wish came true as soon as he finished his studies and joined Herculès-Ashland.
When he joined Saipol, his connections with the plant industry led him to defend “one of the last French flagship companies in seed processing and a player in plant-based chemistry that makes sense, since it is linked to local agriculture and meets environmental challenges,” he emphasizes. Agriculture, which he has already worked with for 12 years, starting in 2009, via fertilizers, but always on the management side of industrial sites, within GPN, Total’s fertilizer subsidiary acquired in 2013 by Borealis. His experience was enriched on the public relations side with the administration and social partners in connection with safety issues.

As such, he is a strong advocate of transparency with local stakeholders. Saipol’s role in agricultural, food and energy transitions goes hand in hand with a secure, reliable and flexible industrial tool.

His role within the Management Committee: to provide the right perspective on decisions so that the production tool can fulfil its mission under the best possible conditions.

A job behind a desk filling in Excel spreadsheets are not for her! Planning doesn’t mean filling in rows or columns. No wonder that when she joined Saipol in 2017 as head of planning and S&OP (Sales and Operation Planning), and then took over as head of Supply Chain in September 2021, she favors oral exchanges. They are far more effective than emails in briefing plant and center teams, adjusting seed and oil supply programs, production schedules and order fulfillment. “Having a plan is essential, but nothing is a given,” she says.
Being in the thick of things has been Estelle Bregetzer’s motto throughout her career. In 2003, she was the first woman to become operational director of the nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing site at Grand-Puits (77), then owned by Grande Paroisse. Her method: dialogue and perfect mastery of the tool. “We live the plant with the teams, we know all its pipes,” she says.
In 2010, she put this experience to good use by taking on a more central role as industrial director before accepting a more business-oriented mission in 2013 when GPN was bought out by Boréalis. Appointed Supply Chain Manager and attached to the sales department, she was already ensuring the proper coverage of production plans in conjunction with sales plans.

Fertilizers were not the only playground of this process engineer, specialized in robotics. The first part of her career, which began in 1996, was devoted to the plastics industry, notably at the BP plant in Lavéra and the Elf plant in Lacq.

At Saipol, she opened up to the agro-industry and agricultural raw materials. Recently, she has been working with traders. Agility is the order of the day, every day. It is the only way to make their current business compatible with her need to anticipate. Very instructive.

Her role in the management committee: Ensure that customer satisfaction objectives are met, while optimizing the total cost of operations and ensuring compliance with sustainable development.

What is a little girl to do for a living, a little girl who builds trucks with her Lego Technic, who is passionate about racing in the Australian desert with solar-powered machines starting from primary school, and later on, after completing her engineering studies, takes part in the Shell ecoMarathon speed contest for the most kilometres driven on one litre of petrol? Obviously a job related to mobility and renewable energy! After studying at the Ecole Centrale Marseille, and following a visit to Canada, Claire Duhamel began her career with Shell in 1998. She worked in all sectors: lubricant for boat engines, fuel for planes, bitumen for roads… Twenty years later, she said stop. The question of which direction to take arose in order to add the environmental dimension to her passion. She joined Saipol in March 2020 after completing her general management training programme at Essec. Since then, she has been paving the way to take the Oleo100 chain as far as possible.

Her role within the Management Committee is to  : développer Oleo100 et develop Oleo100 and to contribute her vision of the fuel market in the context of the energy mix. 

Natacha Bidna, Saipol’s Finance and Administration Director, is bursting with energy! Her communicative energy is clear in her ambition to move forward as a team, hand in hand with each and every one of her employees. Her motto? “We are part of an ecosystem, and it is the whole that makes it successful. You only succeed if everyone succeeds!” She attributes her success to the people who have worked alongside and inspired her. Her strength also lies in her resilience in the face of challenges, and her insatiable thirst for learning.

One striking example is when she took up the role of financial controller for a British subsidiary of Avril without speaking a word of English. For her, there is no alternative. “You pick up the language very quickly when you have no other choice,” she said.

Natacha was born and raised in the south of Ukraine, and moved to France in 2005. She obtained a master’s degree in industrial management at the ESA in Angers, mastered perfect French as taught by her mother, a teacher, as well a Ukrainian diploma in chartered accountancy. She is proud of her origins and her rural roots: “Back home, everyone is linked to the land in order to feed themselves, and I’m delighted to continue to serve this land in my professional life,” she stated.

In France, she began her career with Lactalis before joining the Axéreal cooperative group, as head of Commercial Management Control. She then joined Saipol in 2018, in charge of management control for the biodiesel business. Two years later, she took over the administrative and financial management of three Avril subsidiaries: Kerfoot, Novastel and Lecico. In 2022, she then returned to Saipol’s Finance Department as Head of Management Control. Following this experience, she became Deputy Finance Director in September 2024.

She undertook a new direction on 1 November 2024; she now manages Saipol’s finances to support the company’s development strategy. “I remain as the co-pilot, supporting the management committee and company,” she said. Her message is clear: “Finance is not an end in and of itself, it’s just another service we provide to society, to help us achieve our goals together”.

A wind from the east pushed Isabelle Lemarié to Saipol in March 2008. She did not come from far away as she had been working at Lu in the Paris suburbs since September 2001. A graduate engineer from ENITA Bordeaux (Bordeaux Science Agro today), she arrived at a time when the Ukrainian sunflower oil crisis was affecting all industrial players in Europe. This means that she quickly adapted to the new environment to take the necessary decisions. Under her management, the teams at headquarters and in the plants ensure that the quality of Saipol’s products and services is recognised as one of the best in the industry. Her creed: “In the quality business, we are here to protect against risks, anticipate customer expectations, help find solutions, co-construct efficient production models and support the business”. And she also applies this to innovation, since she supports the implementation of projects that contribute to the company’s growth.

Her role in the management committee isto guarantee the quality of products and services and the progress of innovation projects.

An ESA engineer from Angers and holder of a “Master of Agricultural Economics” (Clemson, University SC, USA), trader at heart, Jean-Philippe Penet is enthusiastic about his mission to manage the trading and sales managers and the managers of the crushing, esterification and refining divisions. However, he could not see himself doing any other job than leading from the front on the market: “I was born to do this”, he says ironically, analysing his early years at Vandemoortele, when his factories were leased by Sofiprotéol before they were taken over in the 1990s, and then at Saipol. What drives him? Controlling the risk chain. His in-depth knowledge of the world commodities markets led him to rethink for an entire year the entire raw materials purchasing strategy and the development of the vegetable oil and protein supply. His slogan for a return to growth: “To secure the origins of seeds, both in France and in the main exporting countries in order to meet all our customers’ demands and allow projects to emerge”.

His role within the Management Committee: to be the strategic reference for the grain and energy markets

We all have our little secret peccadilloes! So, when Isabelle Weber looks back on her fifteen-year career, she doesn’t hesitate one second to confess one of hers: “I love, dry, arid prose!” Yes, the kind of text where you need to stop every four words and look back at the preceding four to try to figure out what they mean together. Like CE regulations, for example? And she likes to share that pleasure by making the drawn-out drone of legal articles “comprehensible to everyone so we can move ahead.”

Trained as a practitioner of European law, she specialises in the agri-food businesses. And that immerses her, every day, in another pleasure, one that everyone shares: eating good, all-natural food products. Since she joined Saipol in September 2022, after ten years with Danone and the start of a career in consulting, she’s kept to the course she has set for herself: “Engaging with companies who share values that are linked to the Earth and the agro-ecological transition,” she stresses. Isabelle has also not shied away from the opportunity to increase the challenges by diving into the area of biofuels regulations: “Not a year goes by when things don’t change, which makes building a long-term strategy more complex. Still it’s exciting, because my key task at Saipol is to anticipate regulatory changes in order to identify new markets for seeds for energy, for food, and for other uses. ” Because at Saipol, ideas are sprouting every day! A project that excites her? “The idea of intercropping with camelina to be used in biofuel and as a new source of vegetable protein. ” She also highlights her role as a legislative ‘evangelist’ when regulatory developments become complex to implement.

Her mission within the Management Committee: Work with and within regulations to secure the company’s choices and seize opportunities.