INFLATION: “It’s not March that will be red but the second quarter” of the year, estimated Thursday on BFM / RMC Michel-Edouard Leclerc
A sharp rise in prices is to be expected on supermarket shelves. “It’s not March that will be red but the second quarter” of the year, estimated Thursday on BFM / RMC Michel-Edouard Leclerc. For good reason, the prices requested by agri-food suppliers in the context of negotiations with large retailers, which will end on March 1st, are higher than those in force.
If some specialists speak of a “red march” for prices on the shelves of supermarkets, for the leader in food distribution, the price increases will “be passed on until July, because it takes four or five months » to get them back on the shelves of supermarkets. “The new prices apply to new orders, when there is still stock available, it is at the old price”, detailed Michel-Edouard Leclerc.
No “red march” for the government
If prices are not going to rise suddenly, “consumers will still see a lot of increases”, he specified, while the Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire had affirmed Monday that there had “no reason for there to be a red march”.
Michel-Edouard Leclerc denounced, like his colleagues in the mass distribution, the “enormous increases” demanded by their agro-industrial suppliers, giving as an example the rise in the price of sugar which, according to him, increased by 22% the previous year and for which a supplier requested “53.82% more than last year”.
Like every year, supermarkets and their agro-industry suppliers must agree on the prices and conditions of the sale of pasta, steaks or other yoghurts, which will then be marketed on the shelves.
Traditionally tense, these negotiations are all the more so this year with the sharp inflation of many production costs, from packaging to agricultural raw materials, including energy.
Only one in two industrialists have signed all their contracts with their distributor customers, an unusually low rate one week before the close, the main organization of the agri-food industry said on Wednesday.
For Ania, “some distributors will wait until the last minute”. The organization also mentioned, “many threats of delisting of products by supermarkets if they do not obtain the desired prices. »
