From a PhD thesis to a profession
TerriFlux did not come out of nowhere: the company industrialises a method born in 2016 in Inria’s STEEP team and proven over ten years of public studies. Here is the story — and where it is heading.
The timeline
Every era left something that is still in use: a method, a tool, a network, a proof.
- 2013 – 2016
A thesis, a method
It all starts with a PhD in Inria’s STEEP team.
In June 2016, Jean-Yves Courtonne defends “Environmental assessment of territories through supply chain analysis” (Université Grenoble Alpes, supervised by Denis Dupré and Pierre-Yves Longaretti). The method is already all there: describe a supply chain as products and sectors, reconcile heterogeneous data through optimisation, quantify uncertainties, scale down from national to regional, and render the result as a Sankey diagram. Julien Alapetite, TerriFlux’s future founder, contributes from the very beginning — the thesis thanks him “without whom I might not have been able to eventually start this thesis”. The first two co-authored papers appear in Ecological Economics (2015) and the Journal of Industrial Ecology (2016).
Courtonne PhD thesis (Inria STEEP)Ecological Economics 2015Journal of Industrial Ecology 2016 - 2017 – 2019
AF Filières: the method scales up
An ADEME project industrialises the thesis — and lays the groundwork for everything that followed.
Funded by ADEME’s GRAINE call and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, coordinated by Inria STEEP with AURA-EE, INRA’s Forest Economics Laboratory and Julien Alapetite, the AF Filières project applies the method at full scale: the forest-wood chain across France and its 13 regions, the dairy chain in four simultaneous units (total mass, dry matter, fat, protein), seventeen agricultural supply chains with the GIS Avenir Élevages. The thesis scripts become software: a reconciliation engine and an online Sankey editor — the direct ancestors of MFAProblem and OpenSankey. The results are published on flux-biomasse.fr, data files included: transparency about sources and uncertainties becomes our signature. The closing report notes one remaining gap: “diagnosis, but no forward-looking analysis”. That observation has been our roadmap ever since.
flux-biomasse.fr13 regions3 families of supply chains - 2018 – 2021
The first field studies
The method leaves the lab and meets its first commissioning clients.
The GIS Avenir Élevages maps the raw materials of animal feed (2018-2019). The DRAAF Grand Est commissions an analysis of the regional forest-wood chain, published as a government report (2020-2021). The Pôle Excellence Bois of the Savoie area has its local wood chain mapped. ADEME Bourgogne-Franche-Comté commissions the straw supply chain study (2021). These studies, begun under the Inria flag, demonstrate that demand exists — and that a dedicated structure is needed to answer it.
GIS Avenir ÉlevagesGrand EstSavoieBFC straw - 2021
TerriFlux: the spin-off
The company is founded in Moirans to carry the method for the long run.
TerriFlux is born in 2021 as an Inria spin-off and takes over the code base developed since the thesis — the AF Filières report already documented it as a “project sharing the same code base”. Now a worker-owned cooperative (SCOP), it obtains as early as 2023 a tax ruling recognising the R&D character of its flow-modelling work. The founding principle has never changed: every published research advance becomes a usable feature, every study feeds the tool.
Inria spin-offSCOPMoirans (Isère) - 2022 – 2023
Proof by projects
Eight projects in two years, from subsidised research to national contracts.
TerriFlux coordinates RefFlux with seven agricultural technical institutes — 1,200 data points collected from field to plate, 19,000 flows computed. It joins BACCFIRE (forest carbon, coordinated by ONF) and Scalable (supply chain coefficients, coordinated by INRAE), wins a French Tech Émergence grant to make reconciliation interactive, and, together with IFIP, wins the FranceAgriMer contract to map the flows of pork products. In Hauts-de-France, the ORBE collective buys a novel model: two supply chains delivered, one coached, one training course — the client becomes autonomous with the tool. And IGN opens the CartoFob project: plugging Sankey diagrams directly into its forest databases.
RefFlux (coord.)BACCFIREIFIP × FranceAgriMerORBECartoFob (IGN) - 2024 – 2026
Industrialisation
The tool becomes a product, the studies become pipelines.
OpenSankey, the open-source editor, is joined by the MFASankey SaaS editions and the MFAProblem engine. For IGN, the CartoFob pipeline now runs on its own: the forest data of the 13 regions become some 150 diagrams, regenerable with a single command and delivered as Docker images. The CNRS (Environnement Ville Société laboratory) entrusts us with the analysis of France’s energy metabolism. The Pays Voironnais prints our first Sankey as an A3 double-page spread in its annual waste report. The work is published at the Journées de la Recherche Porcine, at the JRSS, in INRAE Productions Animales — and the BACCFIRE final event in May 2026 brings together ministries, ADEME and the strategic committee of the wood industry.
MFASankeyCartoFob deliveredCNRS · MetabolheatFirst print double-page
The organic link with STEEP
The STEEP team (Sustainability Transition, Environment, Economy and Local Policy, Inria · CNRS · Université Grenoble Alpes) works on the transition of territories towards sustainability. It is the lab we come from — and Inria’s activity reports present TerriFlux as “our startup”. The link is not a memory: it is organic, and it works both ways.
The same code, two faces
The tool the Inria reports call “Sankeytool” is OpenSankey; academic reconciliation and MFAProblem share the same core. STEEP explores the methods, TerriFlux industrialises and maintains them.
People, not logos
Julien Alapetite is an external collaborator of the team, cited in every activity report; Jean-Yves Courtonne and Pierre-Yves Longaretti co-authored our founding papers. The Scalable, SOCLE and WooDyn projects bring us together in consortia.
The lab’s work, published with us
TerriFlux hosts and publishes the maps produced by the team’s theses and internships: the biophysical assessment of France, the Beaufort cheese chain in Maurienne. The science stays open, the showcase is shared.
Where we are heading
The programme for the coming years answers the observation left by AF Filières in 2019: after diagnosis, foresight.
VEM: converging the tools
The French forest-wood industry (FBF, CODIFAB) wants its modelling tools to converge. After a scoping study delivered in 2026 with Carbone 4 and FCBA, TerriFlux is positioned as technical lead for the programme to come: plugging energy and material recovery (VEM) into shared flow schemas.
BACC-ON-TRACC: regionalising carbon foresight
The successor to BACCFIRE, with ONF, IGN, FCBA, AgroParisTech and INRAE: a regionalised, dynamic and probabilistic flow analysis of the forest-wood chain under climate scenarios, applied to Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. TerriFlux carries the largest budget in the consortium.
WooDyn: from snapshot to film
Moving from the photo to the film: flows and stocks in dynamics (cohorts, lifetimes), coupled with a “transition” LCA that reasons in systems. Each process becomes a reusable Sankey building block — the answer, ten years on, to the 2019 observation: “diagnosis, but no forward-looking analysis”.
And the European scale
The method born for French regions is now a candidate at continental scale: mapping European biomass flows with the same triptych — sourced data, reconciliation, uncertainties on display. The application is under review; we will say more when the time comes.
The published work
Ten years of maps in open access — data, uncertainties and sources included. They are all gathered in the Gallery.
Associated theses
The method was built through four academic works, all carried out in or with the STEEP team.
- Jean-Yves Courtonne (2016). Environmental assessment of territories through supply chain analysis — biophysical accounting for deliberative decision support. PhD thesis, Université Grenoble Alpes / Inria STEEP. The AF Filières method is founded there.
- Michela Bevione (2021). Territorial metabolism and wealth creation: the Beaufort cheese chain in Maurienne. PhD thesis, UGA / Inria STEEP × PACTE. Maps hosted by TerriFlux.
- Emmanuel Krieger (2022). Biophysical assessment of the French economy — nine material and energy chains. Master’s thesis, Inria STEEP. Diagrams published by TerriFlux.
- Alexandre Borthomieux (2024). Data reconciliation for material flow analysis of supply chains. PhD thesis, Inria STEEP. The algorithmic core that MFAProblem industrialises.
The scientific papers (Ecological Economics, Journal of Industrial Ecology, JRSS, Journées de la Recherche Porcine, INRAE Productions Animales…) are listed on the Research page.
The next chapter is written with the supply chains
A supply chain to map, an observatory to equip, a research project to build?