In the fight against inflation, Bruno Le Maire intends to put pressure this Wednesday on the food industry. They are indeed summoned to Bercy by the government, which urges them to renegotiate with the supermarkets in order to bring down the very high prices on the shelves as quickly as possible.
If, at the start of the war in Ukraine, certain industrialists “quickly passed on the rise (in cereal or energy prices), they less quickly passed on the recent drop” in certain prices, Emmanuel Macron lamented Monday on TF1. . The Head of State therefore called for “reopening negotiations” with large retailers. “The objective is that we absorb this (food) inflation by the fall,” he added, inflation measured at nearly 15% over one year in April.
Negotiations completed on March 1
Each year, the prices of products sold to supermarkets are set after a period of negotiation. That for 2023, completed on March 1, resulted in an average increase of around 10% in the prices paid by brands to manufacturers. The latter demanded increases to take into account the increase in their production costs. But since then, the costs of certain agricultural raw materials or energy have tended to stabilize or even fall.
The government therefore insists that manufacturers must lower the selling price to supermarkets. In the event of refusal, “we will use all the instruments at our disposal, including the tax instrument, to recover margins which would be undue margins made on the backs of consumers”, warned the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire. .
Faced with three members of the government – the Minister for the Economy, the Minister Delegate for Industry Roland Lescure, and the Minister Delegate in particular for Trade, Olivia Grégoire – they are the representatives of Ania, the main organization of industrialists in food industry and Ilec, which carries the voice of major brand manufacturers (Coca-Cola, Danone, L’Oréal or Nestlé), who are expected at Bercy. They have already indicated that they are ready to discuss again on a case-by-case basis, but that there could not be “renegotiations on all products”, according to Jean-Philippe André, president of Ania.
The FNSEA worried about a price war
These verbal contests take place under the worried eye of farmers, who always fear that price wars will be to the detriment of their own income. On RTL Monday, the new president of the FNSEA, Arnaud Rousseau, thus called on the government to name those who “abuse”. He also warned that, in any case, prices would not return to their pre-crisis levels, a point on which he agrees with the most media representative of supermarkets, Michel-Edouard Leclerc.