Peugeot: Great Grind

A Best of France selection.

In 1810, forward-thinking brothers Jean-Pierre and Jean-Frédéric Peugeot transformed their family’s flour mill in Hérimoncourt, near Montbéliard and the Swiss border, into a steel mill. Their early products ranged from saws and clock mechanisms to crinoline cages for hoop skirts and, in 1874, long before they started manufacturing automobiles, they made the first Peugeot pepper mills. Today, along with their more famous cars, the company is still known for top-quality moulins à poivre. Stop by their showroom on the Champs-Elysées and you’ll see some wildly futuristic prototype cars, but you’ll also find an entire wall of shelves filled with pepper mills, from traditional wooden models to the high-tech Elis Sense, the newest electric mill complete with LED light that automatically dispenses your favorite grind at the touch of your hand. With spiraled double rings of teeth, Peugeot mills efficiently transform peppercorns into the finest powder or the coarsest cracked pepper. Peugeot also makes coffee, salt and other spice mills, each with a mechanism specially adapted to its use. In all, there are more than 50 models of mills, including the Z, the first model designed in 1874 and still busily engaged in the daily grind.

Peugeot showroom: 136 ave des Champs-Elysées, Paris 8th. website

Peugeot mills are also available at fine stores in the US.

Originally published in the December 2008 issue of France Today; updated in January 2012