As the price of flour soars, industry professionals denounce a “demagogic and value-destroying” measure
The entire wheat industry was indignant on Wednesday at the launch by the Leclerc group of a baguette at 0.29 euros, denouncing a “demagogic and value-destroying” campaign.
Michel-Edouard Leclerc announced on Tuesday that he was freezing the price of baguette bread in the group’s stores at 29 euro cents for at least four months, in the name of defending the purchasing power of the French.
“Value destroying prices”
A declaration of war for the entire wheat sector. Cereals, millers and bakers, as well as the FNSEA, the leading agricultural union, denounced in a joint press release “prices that deliberately destroy values”.
They are indignant at a “demagogic” announcement when “the prices of cereals and consequently of flour are experiencing high prices, production costs (salaries, etc.) are rising sharply and the average price of the baguette, in France in 2021 according to INSEE is 0.90 euro”.
A tense context
“We seek to preserve employment and quality, this has a cost: the players must be properly remunerated, those who plant, who harvest, who assemble the grains and make the flour, and those who make the bread. What Leclerc is doing is shameful,” Jean-Francois Loiseau, president of the French National Milling Association, told Jean-Francois Loiseau.
“Mr. Leclerc will have to explain to us how and how much he pays bakers with a baguette at 29 cents,” reacted Christiane Lambert, patron saint of the FNSEA. In addition, Leclerc “breaks prices” in the particularly tense context of annual negotiations between producers and distributors, underline the players in the sector.
Michel-Edouard Leclerc made no secret of it: “Flour suppliers have invoked the rise in the price of wheat a lot, to ask for considerable increases”, he declared on BFMTV on Tuesday, defending his choice on a ” flagship product”, “inflation marker”.