Spectacular turnaround at Bercy. After the announcement on Monday of the end of the exemption on meal vouchers, which since the summer of 2022 has allowed the purchase of any food product, the revolt of employees against employees forced the government to backpedal. Tuesday, the Minister for Commerce Olivia Grégoire announced the extension of this exemption for 2024. And this Wednesday, Bruno Le Maire declared himself open “on the more general use of these tickets to buy food”, on Europe 1 and CNews.
“Should we not use meal vouchers more generally for the purchase of food products? Shouldn’t we change this name which is a little misleading? With a single obsession, that it corresponds to people’s expectations,” declared the minister. Born at the end of the 1960s in France, meal vouchers are used today by more than five million employees to pay for meals or food services at some 234,000 merchants.
“Less than one in two tickets is used in restaurants”
In September 2022, their use was extended to products that are not directly consumable without cooking or preparation (flour, pasta, rice, eggs, fish, meat, etc.). A response to inflation in the midst of a health crisis and the start of the war in Ukraine. But more than a year later, the purchasing power of the French has not improved, with inflation at 8% over one year on food products. So much so that the use of meal vouchers in supermarkets has increased by three to four points, according to the National Commission for Meal Vouchers (CNTR), confirming a trend that has been in place for several years.
Today, “less than one ticket in two is used in restaurants”, indicates Franck Delveau, president of the Union of Hotel Trades and Industries (Umih) Île-de-France, on the set from BFM TV. While the restaurant voucher was originally designed to support restaurateurs, the latter are now directly opposed to a transformation into a “caddy voucher”. “It is up to the public authorities to propose specific measures with, for example, the creation of a food voucher,” believes Franck Chaumes, president of the catering branch of Umih.