Senate report finds no ‘suspicious massive increases’ in food products

The Senate found no “massive phenomenon of suspicious increases in supplier prices”, according to a report released Tuesday, July 20. At the end of June, the president of the strategic committee of E. Leclerc stores, Michel Edouard Leclerc had deplored on BFMTV that “half of the requested increases” by manufacturers in the context of renegotiations on the price of foodstuffs intended to be sold by supermarkets were not “not transparent” and “suspicious”.

But the work of senators “did not make it possible to observe, beyond [quelques] specific cases, a generalized phenomenon of excessive increases”writes the tracking group “Egalim”, named after the food law, in a report approved on Tuesday by the Senate’s Economic Affairs Committee. On the other hand, the parliamentarians noted that the General Directorate for Competition, Consumer Affairs and the Repression of Fraud (DGCCRF) had identified price increases on the shelves by “certain distributors”whereas they “had not signed an increase in the purchase price of the product with the supplier”. Practices “facilitated by the fact that consumers expect, in any case, to see strong inflation on the shelves”.

Senate report picks up on commodity inflation numbers “particularly impressive”citing an increase in the price of glass by 45%, cardboard by 60%, cereals by 75% and judges that it is, as such, “no wonder that the requests for price increases from manufacturers are particularly high”.