Carrefour pulls PepsiCo products in four EU countries over price hikes | France

The French supermarket chain Carrefour has said it will stop selling PepsiCo products in stores in four European countries because the global food company has put its prices up by too much.

Shelves at Carrefours in France, Italy, Spain and Belgium will from Thursday carry signs saying the store will no longer stock PepsiCo products such as fizzy drinks, Lay’s and Doritos crisps and Quaker cereals “due to unacceptable price increases”.

Some of the group’s brands such as Cheetos and 7Up were not available at a Carrefour supermarket in the Paris suburb of Auteuil on Thursday, while others such as Pepsi were still on shelves, next to the sign.

At a Carrefour supermarket in Paris’s upmarket 16th arrondissement, customers broadly cheered the move. “It doesn’t surprise me at all,” Edith Carpentier told Reuters. “I think there will be lots of products left on the shelves because they have become too expensive and they are all things we can avoid buying.”

PepsiCo did not respond to a request for comment.

The US company said in October it planned “modest” price increases this year as demand held up despite rises, leading it to hike its 2023 profit forecast for a third straight time.

Over the past year, grocery retailers in several countries including Germany and Belgium announced they had stopped orders from consumer goods firms due to price rises, a tactic in price negotiations that have become more fraught due to inflation.

Carrefour has been one of the most active retailers to challenge big consumer products and food companies over prices. Last year, the French multinational started a “shrinkflation” campaign of sticking warnings on products that have shrunk in size but cost more.

In its efforts to lower inflation, the French government has asked retailers and suppliers to wrap up annual price negotiations in January, two months sooner than usual.

France is unusual in Europe in that it strongly regulates the retail sector, forcing supermarkets to negotiate prices only once a year with food and drink producers, in an attempt to protect its agricultural industry.

But the last negotiation round early last year, at the peak of the inflation crisis, locked in very high price increases across the board, which has hit turnover at supermarkets and made them keen to negotiate price cuts this time round.

“The French supermarkets, we know, are very, very ready to delist people if they don’t like the deals that they get,” said James Walton, the chief economist at the Institute of Grocery Distribution. “Obviously that’s a last resort, because nobody wins if the goods that people want are not available on the shelves.”