Our studies cite ADEME, FranceAgriMer, Agreste, “the technical institutes”, “the interbranch organisations” — three dozen French acronyms that say nothing outside France, and not much inside it either. This page says what each of them is, what it produces, at which level it operates, and where we meet.
Reading a Sankey diagram means knowing where each figure comes from. A production tonnage from Agreste, a processing yield from a technical institute and a share of outlets from an interbranch organisation are not the same kind of number: they are not collected by the same people, not for the same purpose, and they rarely agree at first.
That disagreement is not a flaw of the sources — it is the normal state of a supply chain observed from several sides. Our reconciliation method exists precisely to make those numbers agree, and to say by how much each one had to move to get there. Which is why this page exists too: a flow diagram is only as readable as the ecosystem behind it.
Every entry below answers what kind of body is this — a State agency, a technical institute, an interbranch organisation, a laboratory, a network, a local authority — and at which level does it operate. That second question is the one usually left out, and the one that decides what a study can actually see:
A supply chain looks like a different object at each of those levels. Making the three tell one consistent story is most of the work.
Rows are kinds of organisation, columns are the level they work at. Click any box to read its entry.
Almost every framing figure of a French flow study is public. A ministry service counts the harvests, an agency funds and publishes the references, an operator watches each market, customs record what crosses the border. The same State reappears one level down, in the regions, through its deconcentrated services. These bodies are our first sources — and often the ones commissioning the study.
French Agency for Ecological Transition
The public agency for energy, waste, biomass and the ecological transition. It funds research through calls for projects, publishes national references and commissions studies; its online library keeps the resulting reports openly available. Each region has its own ADEME directorate, with its own budget and its own priorities.
With TerriFlux — Funder of most of our R&D projects, from AF Filières (2017) to BACC-ON-TRACC (2026).
National establishment for agricultural and seafood products
The Ministry of Agriculture’s operator for agricultural and seafood markets: one observatory per supply chain, published balance sheets, and the administration of French and European aid. This is where a chain’s market data is consolidated.
With TerriFlux — Commissioned, with IFIP, our mapping of pork product flows in France.
National observatory of biomass resources
Created in 2009 and hosted by FranceAgriMer, it assembles the national assessment of biomass resources and their uses — agricultural, forest and waste — across chains that are otherwise counted separately. The closest thing France has to a public balance sheet of its biomass.
Statistics and foresight service of the Ministry of Agriculture
Official French agricultural statistics: the farm census, the annual agricultural statistics, and the surveys behind them, published nationally and region by region. Areas, yields, herds and production volumes start here.
French customs
Customs publish foreign trade statistics product by product. Imports and exports are what close a national balance — and often what a supply chain knows least well about itself.
National institute of geographic and forest information
The national mapping agency, and since 2012 the holder of the national forest inventory: the only continuous measurement of standing timber, growth and harvest in France.
With TerriFlux — Client of CartoFob: Sankey diagrams plugged straight into its forest databases — some 150 of them, regenerated by a single command.
French National Forests Office
The public establishment that manages France’s state-owned and municipal forests, down to the individual forest plot, and one of the country’s main sources of harvest data.
With TerriFlux — Coordinator of BACCFIRE (2022-2025) and of its successor BACC-ON-TRACC.
Regional directorates for food, agriculture and forestry
The Ministry of Agriculture in the regions: regional statistics (the regional arm of Agreste), sector policy, and the commissioning of territorial studies.
With TerriFlux — The DRAAF Grand Est commissioned our analysis of its regional forest-wood chain, published as a government report.
Regional directorates for the environment, planning and housing
The environment ministry in the regions: energy, waste, industrial installations, risks and planning. The DREAL side of a territory’s data rarely meets the DRAAF side on its own — which is often exactly the flow we are asked to draw.
French public investment bank
Grants and financing for innovative companies, including the French Tech schemes, delivered through regional offices.
With TerriFlux — A French Tech Émergence grant funded Real-Time, our interactive reconciliation core.
A French speciality: for each sector, a non-profit applied-research institute, run by the profession itself, qualified by the Ministry of Agriculture and partly financed by a levy on the chain. They hold what no statistic publishes — processing yields, feed rations, technical coefficients, field references — and they are the ones who can tell you whether a computed flow is plausible. Nineteen of them are federated by Acta; the forest-wood chain has its equivalent in FCBA, the food industries theirs in the agri-food institutes.
Arable crops: cereals, maize, sorghum, potato, forage crops and fibre flax, with experimental stations across the country.
Oilseeds, protein crops and hemp: rapeseed, sunflower, soybean, pea, faba bean — and the crushing yields that turn a seed into oil and meal.
Institut de l’Élevage (French livestock institute)
Ruminants — cattle, sheep and goats — from the herd to the dairy and meat chains.
IFIP, the French pig and pork institute
The pig sector, from the farm to processed pork products.
With TerriFlux — Partner of the FranceAgriMer study on pork product flows, and co-author of our papers at the Journées de la Recherche Porcine.
Technical institute for poultry, rabbit and fish farming
Poultry, rabbit and fish farming — the sectors whose feed conversion ratios drive a large share of cereal use.
Interbranch technical centre for fruit and vegetables
Fruit and vegetables, from production to the fresh-produce trade.
Institute for organic farming and food
Organic farming and food, across every sector: the reference for the yields, rotations and practices that a conventional average silently averages away.
Agri-food technical institute (formerly Actilait for dairy)
The processing side: dairy products, food safety and food-industry processes — where the technical institutes of agriculture hand over to those of the food industries.
Technological institute for forest, pulp, wood construction and furniture
The technical institute of the forest-wood industries, from the sawmill to construction and furniture. It publishes the sector surveys a wood-chain diagram is built on.
With TerriFlux — Partner in BACCFIRE and BACC-ON-TRACC.
Study and research centre on the economics and organisation of animal production
A study centre hosted by AgroParisTech, expert in feed formulation and in the markets for the raw materials that feed livestock.
An interprofession gathers, for a single supply chain, every link from the producer to the retailer. Recognised by the State and financed by a compulsory voluntary levy (CVO) paid by the chain itself, they run their own observatories: on processing and outlets, their figures are often the only consolidated ones in existence. Reading them means knowing who funds them — which is exactly why we reconcile them against public statistics instead of choosing between the two. Some chains, wood in particular, organise themselves region by region.
National interbranch centre for the dairy economy
The dairy chain, from milk collection to cheese, butter, powders and their exports.
With TerriFlux — Among the funders of the animal feed study.
French pork interbranch organisation
The pork chain, from the farm to processing and consumption.
The cereals chain: collection, milling, malting, starch, animal feed and export.
Vegetable oils and proteins: rapeseed, sunflower, soybean and protein crops, with the annual statistics of the sector.
With TerriFlux — Among the funders of the animal feed study.
French interbranch organisation for cattle and meat
The cattle, sheep and horse meat chains, from the livestock market to the butcher’s counter.
French poultry meat interbranch organisation
The poultry meat chain: chicken, turkey, duck and guinea fowl, from hatchery to slaughterhouse.
Regional forest-wood interbranch organisations, federated by Fibois France
The wood chain organises itself by region: one Fibois per region, gathering forest owners, sawmills, construction and wood energy, and running the regional observatory of the chain. Fibois France federates them nationally.
Chambers of agriculture, headed by APCA
Public professional bodies, one per department and per region: advisers to farmers, and producers of the local references that a national average always hides.
With TerriFlux — APCA is among the funders of the animal feed study.
Our method came out of public research and still lives there: a spin-off, joint projects, co-supervised PhDs, peer-reviewed papers. These are the laboratories that check our results — and sometimes commission them.
National institute for research in digital science and technology
The French national research institute for computer science and applied mathematics. Its STEEP team in Grenoble is where the reconciliation method was designed.
With TerriFlux — Our origin: the founding PhD, the first prototypes, and the spin-off that became TerriFlux in 2021.
National research institute for agriculture, food and the environment
Born in 2020 from the merger of INRA and Irstea, it is our counterpart on livestock, forestry and supply-chain economics, and the publisher of the journal INRAE Productions Animales.
With TerriFlux — Coordinator of the Scalable project (LESSEM lab); its Forest Economics Laboratory (LEF) was a partner of AF Filières.
French National Centre for Scientific Research
France’s main multidisciplinary research organisation. Its Environnement Ville Société laboratory (UMR 5600) works on the metabolism of cities and territories.
With TerriFlux — MetabolHeat: research subcontracting on the energy metabolism of France.
The French grande école for life, food, forestry and environmental sciences, and a research partner of the technical institutes.
With TerriFlux — Partner in BACC-ON-TRACC; host of Céréopa.
The French university dedicated to cities and territories, from materials to mobility.
With TerriFlux — Coordinator of WooDyn, and co-supervisor with Inria of a PhD on dynamic MFA and transition LCA.
France has a legal form for every way of working together, and a study rarely escapes them: a GIS (groupement d’intérêt scientifique) is a formal alliance setting shared research priorities; an RMT (réseau mixte technologique) is a state-labelled network putting research, technical institutes and education around one table; a GIE (groupement d’intérêt économique) lets organisations pool a service or a tool. These structures are where a question too big for one institution gets carried — and where our largest studies were commissioned.
Scientific interest group for the future of livestock farming
A formal alliance between research, education, development bodies and the livestock chains, which agrees on shared research priorities and carries collective work.
With TerriFlux — Led the study of the raw materials used by animal feed in France (2018-2022), one of our largest published mappings.
Joint technological network (RMT) on the economics of agri-food chains
The RMT where research, technical institutes and education work together on the economics of agri-food supply chains.
With TerriFlux — The setting of RefFlux, which we coordinated with seven technical institutes.
The network head of the nineteen French agricultural technical institutes, and their common voice in research programmes.
Network of regional energy and environment agencies
The network that federates the regional energy-environment agencies and observatories, and works towards shared tools and converging methods between regions — the reason a regional flow analysis can hope to be comparable to its neighbour’s.
A flow study is rarely national only. Regions and their energy-environment agencies, biomass units, intercommunal authorities, energy and waste syndicates, local food projects, cooperatives and sector clusters are the ones asking what a supply chain actually does in one place — and the ones who put the answer to work. This is also the level where the data thins out fastest, and where reconciliation earns its keep.
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Energy Environment agency
The energy and environment agency of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, which carries regional observation and transition programmes — one of the agencies federated by RARE.
With TerriFlux — Partner of AF Filières, the project that turned the method into software.
Regional biomass units
Regional bodies bringing together the State services, the ADEME directorate and the region to follow the mobilisation of biomass and arbitrate between its uses — energy, materials, feed. They are the natural readers of a regional biomass Sankey, and often the reason one gets drawn.
The wood industry cluster of the Savoie area, gathering the businesses of a local forest-wood chain.
With TerriFlux — Had its local wood chain mapped, one of our first field studies.
Intercommunal authorities, waste and energy syndicates
The level where flows are actually handled: household waste collected and treated, heat networks, local energy production. Their public reports are both a source and a destination for a diagram — the figures exist, but scattered across services that rarely add up to a balance.
An intercommunal authority in Isère, responsible among other things for collecting and treating household waste.
With TerriFlux — Prints our Sankey of its waste flows as an A3 spread in its annual public report.
Territorial food projects
A local food strategy, run by an intercommunal authority or a group of them, recognised by the Ministry of Agriculture. They ask the question a national statistic cannot answer: what is grown here, and who eats it?
Agricultural cooperatives
They collect the harvest, store it, process part of it and sell the rest. Between the farm and the statistics, they are the ones who actually know where a tonne went — and the hardest data to obtain, because it is commercial.
These bodies are not a list of logos: they are the sources, the funders and the commissioning clients of the studies we publish. Our R&D projects name them one by one, and every mapping in the gallery states which data it used and what the reconciliation had to change.
An organisation missing from this page, or a description to correct? Write to us — we would rather fix it than leave an acronym unexplained.