2023-05-17 17:18:20
Romain Rouillard / Photo credit: RICCARDO MILANI / HANS LUCAS / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP
modified to
00h27, the 18th of 2023
Faced with pressure from the government, the industrialists finally gave in. Gathered this Wednesday morning in Bercy around the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, the agrifood giants have agreed to return to the negotiating table with supermarkets. These annual talks, intended to fix the price of products sold on the shelves for a year, ended last February with an average increase of around 10% in the prices paid by the brands to manufacturers. At the time, the latter were justified by invoking the rise in production costs (raw materials, energy, etc.), but today certain indicators show less prohibitive prices. During his interview at 8:00 p.m. on TF1 on Monday, Emmanuel Macron rightly pointed the finger at these manufacturers who would have “quickly passed on the rise” in prices but “slower passed on the fall”.
Normally, prices are fixed for a period of one year, without the possibility of renegotiating. But inflation decided otherwise. Can this breach of the law lead to the long-awaited drop in prices on the shelves? “Certainly, yes,” replies Rodolphe Bonnasse, retail expert. Because distributors have more than one trick up their sleeve to convince manufacturers, he assures us: “Brands can question the prices offered by large groups because they too have products manufactured and sold under their own brands. distributors. So they can very well say to manufacturers ‘we have seen that the price of wheat has been halved, so how do you justify this price increase?'”
Goldsmith’s work
However, the negotiations promise to be tough. Because if certain raw materials have tended to stabilize or even fall, the cost of labor remains very high. A work of goldsmith therefore awaits the two parties. “We will have to dissect each line”, underlines Rodolphe Bonnasse. And if the price cuts should indeed happen, believing in a spectacular inflection seems utopian. “When you buy a baguette, 7% of the price corresponds to the price of wheat. So even if the latter has been halved, it will only have an impact on 7% of the price. Instead of paying for your baguette a euro, you will pay 97 cents for it”, illustrates the specialist. Clearly, the return of prices in force before the outbreak of war in Ukraine does not appear on the horizon.
Nevertheless, the industrialists remain under the threat brandished by Bruno Le Maire against the most reluctant of them. “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,” assured the Minister of the Economy last week. A weighty argument, assures Rodolphe Bonnasse who nevertheless wishes to qualify: “These are global giants and on the scale of their planetary vision, France remains a small country. Even if we remain a significant market for Nestlé or Coca-Cola , these companies will be able to absorb a commercial difficulty in France. On the other hand, if tomorrow we can benefit from a European position on the subject, it would be different”, he concludes.
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