“… Jean-Jacques Graffin, who founded Serac in 1969, probably had no idea that 50 years later he would have a global group employing more than 600 people and with an annual turnover of over 150 million euros. Now aged 82, this “Arts et Métiers” engineer is at the very heart of a success story matched by very few others in French industry.

Coming from a family of craftsmen, Jean-Jacques Graffin began his career in the early 1960s working in civil engineering in Senegal and then in Cameroon. But France was where he was to find success. In May 1966 he joined Nova Socimec, a company specialising in the manufacture of milk pumps and taps. He designed a machine for filling plastic bottles for packaging the output of a small Breton dairy. At that time there was no supplier of equipment of that kind for small dairies. Sales of these machines followed on…but an idea was taking root in the mind of this engineer…” *

Serac was created out of an inspired idea!

Jean-Jacques Graffin had realised that dairies weighed their plastic bottles when full to monitor the quantity of milk. As the regulatory volumetric measurements were calibrated at a temperature of 20°C and the milk filled at 4°C, weighing made it possible to avoid gaps due to the expansion of the liquids. Hence the apparently simple idea of weighing the container during the filling process. He therefore created the first weigh filler, a first for the food industry. Serac was established in June 1969 and this was the beginning of the success story…

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