The commercial negotiations with agro-industrial suppliers of mass distribution with a turnover of less than 350 million euros, which ended Monday evening, “went well”, assured the media representative of the leader in the sector , E.Leclerc, Michel-Edouard Leclerc.
Negotiations hastened by the government
“The negotiations went well, the French industrialists were rather correct”, declared Michel-Edouard Leclerc on TF1. “I come to you with a rather positive vision of these negotiations.” The government passed a law in November to bring forward by a few weeks the end of the negotiation period between distributors and their suppliers, hoping for a quicker impact on the shelves of reductions in certain wholesale prices, oils or wheat for example.
Commercial negotiations take place each year to determine the conditions of sale (purchase price, shelf space, promotional calendar, etc.) for a large part of the products sold in supermarkets, and usually end on March 1st. But exceptionally, companies must agree more quickly on the conditions of sale for 2024, by Monday evening for suppliers with less than 350 million euros in turnover and no later than January 31 for more large suppliers.
“There will be pockets of price reduction and we will reduce food inflation to 2 or 3% per year,” said Michel-Edouard Leclerc, after average price increases of more than 20% in two years. Negotiations are traditionally more tense with the biggest players, often multinationals, and Carrefour gave an example the previous week by singling out its supplier PepsiCo, manufacturer of the famous soda but also of Lay’s chips and Lipton sweet tea, which it accuses of asking for “unacceptable price increases”.
Michel-Edouard Leclerc also responded to the discounter Lidl, which in an advertisement this weekend accused it of “comparing the incomparable” to present itself as the best selling brand on price: “We must let it have fun as best you can,” he reacted, estimating that “Lidl has difficulty accepting that it has been dethroned on the French podium” in terms of price positioning. The president of Lidl France Michel Biero had compared “distributor brand products with lower prices, even though they are not comparable products” from a quality point of view, according to him.