Paris (France) (AFP) – Food industry manufacturers and distributors are due to meet on Monday afternoon in Bercy, to prepare for the annual commercial negotiations which begin next month in a particularly tense context, with this meeting itself promising to be stormy.

Published on: 02/11/2026 - 11:06

This preparation committee could in fact be boycotted by the Federation of Commerce and Distribution (FCD), which represents the main brands such as E. Leclerc, Carrefour and Intermarché.

She had announced that she would not participate "until two fundamental requirements have been recognized and shared by all": "transparency" on the costs of agricultural raw materials and differentiated treatment for SMEs.

This meeting organized at the Ministry of the Economy, initially scheduled for October 28, must lay the foundations for commercial negotiations which begin in a month.

"We would like to participate. It's just that we want to get out of these meetings which are a theater and postures where we don't make any decisions", declared Monday morning Judith Jiguet, general delegate of the FCD, on Radio Classique.

Their absence has not yet been recorded, she nevertheless stressed: "we still have this whole morning (to decide, Editor's note). We will see."

Every year, from December 1 to March 1, supermarkets and food suppliers carry out negotiations, sometimes brutal, which ultimately determine shelf prices (excluding distributors' own brands) and are regularly accused of putting pressure on farmers' remuneration.

The agri-food manufacturers (Ania, Ilec, Culture Viande, La Coopération agricole and the poultry industries) have criticized in a joint press release the absence of the FCD, believing that it “above all saves them from having to account for their own practices”.

In a separate press release, Pact'Alim, which represents SMEs and mid-sized companies in the agro-industry, believes that "the next negotiations must not reproduce the imbalances observed in recent years".

“Search for a balance”

While the 2026-2027 season of trade negotiations promises to be particularly tense, and inflation inevitable, the government announced two weeks ago that it wanted to bring together the stakeholders upstream, with a view to a “responsibility pact”.

The "directives" will concern "all the actors in these negotiations", explained Sunday the office of the Minister of Commerce Serge Papin, "it will be the search for a balance between the purchasing power of the French and imported inflation which penalizes our farmers and our SMEs".

The cabinet also believes that the demands of the FCD are already taken into account in the new provisions of the agricultural emergency law which provides in particular that the deadline for the end of negotiations with SMEs is shorter than with the rest of the industrialists, in particular to avoid them being "the adjustment variable" at the end of the negotiation period.

The multinationals which supply mass distribution - Coca-Cola, Danone, L'Oréal... - generate net margins "nearly four times higher" than the average for the French agri-food industry, according to a study carried out by the French firm Asterès for the FCD, and published on Monday.

These large groups posted an average net margin of 13% between 2017 and 2025, compared to 3.5% for the entire French agri-food industry between 2018 and 2024, details this study.

"Three quarters of these (commercial) negotiations concern these multinationals. So the effort can be made there, to satisfy both the consumer - accessible prices - and preserve the upstream - agricultural and SMEs", further underlined Judith Jiguet Monday morning.

Ania, for its part, deplored that "the FCD refuses to sit at the table with ministers, but finds the time to publish an off-topic study", which "in no way reflects the reality of companies producing in France".

© 2026 AFP

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