Competitors in stores, large food distribution groups become partners when it comes to discussing financial conditions with suppliers. Their purchasing centers based abroad are today at the heart of the anger of French farmers, victims at the end of the chain of competitive pressure. The Peasant Confederation called on Tuesday, January 30, to “block purchasing centers and target predators of peasant income”either “the places where this pressure is exerted on [les] price “.
Wednesday January 31 in the morning, the union classified on the left indicated that it had installed a filter barrier in front of a Carrefour logistics platform in the Toulouse suburbs and that dedicated to fresh E.Leclerc products, in Cabannes, in Bouches-du -Rhône, which serves around 70 stores.
Against the backdrop of a price war, distributors began to join forces in 2014 to pool their purchases through joint companies located on French territory. With the objective of buying cheaper thanks to larger quantities. Over the years, alliances between brands have been formed and dissolved before gradually relocating abroad.
“We haven’t reaped the benefits yet”
Most brands now use this model to negotiate with large multinationals. E.Leclerc founded in 2016 with the German group Rewe a joint purchasing center, Eurelec Trading, located in Brussels, which the Dutch group Ahold Delhaize joined in September 2023. For its part, Carrefour launched, in 2022 , in Madrid, its own “European purchasing center for major international suppliers”, called Eureca, in order to negotiate for six countries (France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Romania and Poland).
While Système U joined Everest in 2022, a purchasing center located in the Netherlands, to buy with the German Edeka and the Dutch Picnic. “We have not yet reaped the benefits, because the negotiations did not go through Everest this year”we assure at Système U, which takes care to recall that this center concerns its 44 largest suppliers such as Nestlé, L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble, as well as the French Lactalis and Danone, but not its “distributor brands, nor SMEs”.
At the same time, almost all of them have created or joined service centers, also based abroad. Even Intermarché and Casino, which have negotiated their purchases in France within Auxo since 2021, have theirs in Brussels, called Global Retail Services. Through this, distributors market a range of services intended to support suppliers in their development in different countries. Whether it is the European launch of a product (for example, a French charcuterie manufacturer who would like to develop in Germany), promotional operations on several markets at the same time or the reporting of statistical information on their sales…
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