Food prices: the major producers agree to reopen negotiations with supermarkets by the end of May

France’s 75 biggest agri-food producers agreed on Wednesday to reopen negotiations with supermarkets by the end of May, the industry’s main body announced after a meeting with the government, which hopes to bring down high prices on supermarkets. shelves.

“We commit ourselves by the end of May to ‘the top 75’, the 75 largest companies of consumer products in France, returning to the negotiating table”, indicated the president of ANIA, Jean-Philippe André.

Government pressure

Food producers were summoned to Bercy on Wednesday by the government, which urged them to renegotiate with supermarkets to bring down the very high prices on the shelves as quickly as possible.

If, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, certain industrialists “passed quickly to the rise (in the prices of cereals or energy, ed), less quickly they passed to the recent decline” of certain prices, Emmanuel Macron complained on TF1 on Monday.

Every year, the prices of products sold to supermarkets are fixed after a negotiation period. The one for 2023, completed on 1^um March, resulted in an average increase of around 10% in the prices paid by retailers to producers. But since then, the costs of some agricultural commodities or energy have tended to stabilize or even decline.