At 8 in the morning we are leaving Basel on a wonderful morning with blue sky and we are approaching the highway Bern. We see the whole famous mountains of the Bernese Oberland: Schreckhorn, Finsteraarhorn, Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, Blümlisalp and Stockhorn, now blurring in the white back ground of the Föhn-clouds (the typical “mercury sky”) that brings the warm weather to the north, before it starts raining on the next day.
outlook india
Before the highway descends to the Rhone valley we take the exit to Bulle, close to the end of the Freiburgerland, the canton with the famous Gruyere cheese. Bulle is the center of this valley dominated by the still snow covered Moleson and the long stretched Gruyere lake, artificially created by a dam. At the center we find a parking spot just in front of the tourist information. I ask where to buy the famous cheese. We have 2 laiteries (Molkereien) here, one right across the street and the other on 2 blocks away. We start with the 1st one, where we have a choice of 5 different ones. Sel, demi-sel, Douce, semi-douce, normal. The first one normal is the best and we decide to buy also 2 fondues with Vacherin, one with water the other one with wine. The city of Bulle is decorated with flowers everywhere and first guests sit in front of the restaurants and wait in the sun for their lunches. We buy a baguette and taste the cheese: wonderful. The second cheese shop (laitier) offers 8 types of Gruyere and we decide to get the youngest (Cuisine) and the oldest one (24 months old). [1]
Then we continue the trip to the Gruyere village, a castle mountain 7 km away that give the Gruyere Lake the name, even the lake cannot be seen from here. What a surprise: parking lots are full, yellow postal busses dump school kids as it would be to visit Alpine Disney land. Restaurants waiting for the guests and from the small cantonal school we hear piano tunes. The small touristic laiterie started the making of Gruyere cheese in a big rotating copper pot. But the choice of cheese is different from Bulle.
We continue our drive down to Lake Geneva where at the foot of the deep high way descent we exit to Vevey. Turning right at the railway station we find the headquarter of Nestle at the lake shore: A modern concrete skeleton 6-story building with a greenish window façade. Nestle is a diminutive of the middle German nestle, meaning makers of strings and cords (gowns or hats).
We register at the entrance with a lady that recognizes our dialect immediately as Austrian. She is half Austrian from Wels, Oberösterreich, the father is from Iran. Every year they go to Austria. We get a Henniez water as a welcome drink.
We have 15 minutes and we look at the Nestle shop and the main street in front of the building. Between large car selling shops I discover a small Portuguese food shop. Vevey has as many other cities from the Romandie a large Portuguese minority (3-4%). We buy a marmelada at a triple Portugal price because I cannot transport it on the hand luggage of the air plane: Explosive danger! Where he is from, I ask, because I know Porto and the migrants of the North. Oh, just 100 km away in Villa Real he says and now I see also the typical bottles of the Mattheus wine in the wall bins behind him.
The seminar starts sharp at 1:15. And sharp means Swiss timing, a time table with 6 contributions is shown as a beginning slide with exact minutes of presentation. Nestle was founded 1865 by Henry Nestle, a German immigrant and is today the largest food company in the world, before Kraft and Unilever. After 30 minutes with discussions the second presentation starts at 1:45 p.m. sharp as everyone can see from the big clock next to the entrance. Swiss timing, world famous. At one point when the presenter did not look much enough in the direction of the clock, the seminar leader said “5 minutes”. This was just a reminder that other people in the room were afraid that he could not meet his time frame.
Clearly, we all got a chocolate gift and then we could walk through the product exhibition at the 6th floor to the tasting room. Passing 2 coffee machines that offer free coffees, but –what a pity- both waited for a refill at a moment. “Oooh- yo-yoy – yo-yoy”was the only comment of the cleaning lady that needed desperately a Nestle coffee. No seminar presentation without permanent cleaning: A Swiss identifier for proud national companies: clean environment. From the roof terrace next to the vending machines we had a superb view of Lake Geneva, the vineyard mountains in the north and the French Savoy lake shore in the south and the Rhone valley with the Dent du Midi in the East. In the adjacent round Nestle restaurant people ate and enjoyed their coffee in the sunshine. A workers paradise?
The tasting was on Nestle soups around the world. We started with Swiss and a Caribbean clear soup on jelly basis, and then moved on to a white Chinese soup before we had the sharper exposure of the African soups. Then the last ones were the premium soups from Chile: mushroom and Broccoli which were the best. For dessert we got a piece of plain Italian Buitoni cake (http://www.buitoni.com/).
The latest invention shown in the exhibition is a Nespresso type baby milk machine: Milk powder capsules for the modern babies that want to enter Nestle capsule world early enough in their modern life & food cycle.
Finally we got a guide to the latest Nestle division, a digital lab that follows the mentioning of Nestle products all around the world, 24 hours a day: TV, radio, Internet, Facebook, twitter etc. Monitoring the market, look for your major competitors and sales figures and counter act immediately.
Then we spent the rest of Friday evening in the center, where at the market square we found enough parking spots. Shopping in the old town was more individualistic than in German speaking Swiss, we found and the walk at the lakeshore was more delightful than the one in neighboring Montreux with the high rise buildings. In front of the Alimentarium, the Nestle sponsored nutrition museum, closing at 5pm, we found the famous statue of Charlie Chaplin in front and a large fork monument in the water: remember the spaghettis he ate in the silent movies?
At the corner of the parking lot there was an esoteric shop: The blue Papillion. (http://www.le-papillon-bleu.ch/e/ ) The owner Marco from Tessin wanted to sell his Buddha based consulting lessons: 35 Swiss Francs for 15 minutes. Can you live from that I asked? No, he does this only in the evening: in the morning he is an inventor. 2 patents are pending: 1 for catalysts (Katalysatoren) for hybrid cars, and the other patent for electro smog of all kinds, like PCs and cell phones.
Swiss ingenuity of the shore of Lac Leman: Meet the source of Swiss richness of the future: Now and then.