Food inflation: “Prices will not increase or will decrease” for 5,000 references

2023-08-31 16:10:48

The announcement concerns 5,000 references. “The prices (of these products) will not increase or will fall,” said Bruno Le Maire on Thursday on France 2. And this, while the latest figures from INSEE released this morning reveal that inflation has rebounded to 4.8% over one year in August.

The Minister of the Economy says he has reached an agreement on prices with the manufacturers who met this morning in Bercy. He asked them for a “compulsory and immediate pass-through” of the drop in wholesale prices on shelf prices. “We had to call everyone to order”, he declared, and to guarantee the government’s objective of obtaining “price reductions from January 2024”, the controls of the General Directorate of competition, consumption and the repression of fraud (DGCCRF), a service of Bercy, will be reinforced.

The main drivers of inflation in recent months, food prices jumped 11.1% year on year in August, a slower rise than in July (12.7%) but still significant. Faced with this painful problem for many households, Bercy called on everyone to measure up, and the Minister Delegate for Trade Olivia Grégoire announced in April “a visible drop in prices on the shelves” of supermarkets at the start of the school year, that consumers struggle to see.

If he praised the industrialists who “played the game”, such as the pasta specialist Barilla or the oil giant Avril, Bruno Le Maire also pinpointed certain “large multinationals (which) could do much more”. And to mention certain brands, such as Unilever, Nestlé or Pepsi.

In order to speed up the timetable, Le Maire also announced that an early opening of negotiations between manufacturers and large retailers for 2024 would take place in September, and not at the end of the year as is usually the case.

Each year, supermarkets and their agro-industrial suppliers negotiate from December until March 1 the conditions of sale for a large part of the products sold throughout the rest of the year in supermarkets. “We asked to be able to renegotiate really and as quickly as possible” to pass on the shelves of supermarkets the drop in production costs of many foodstuffs, explained Wednesday, on leaving Bercy, the general delegate of the employers’ federation of the great distribution (FCD), Jacques Creyssel.