“The shot is gone.” In an interview with our LSA colleagues, Système U Managing Director Dominique Schelcher announced his group’s decision to phase out PepsiCo France products from U stores.
According to Rayon Boissons, this exclusion is linked to a commercial disagreement between the distributor and the supplier who failed to reach an agreement during the commercial negotiations that ended on March 1.
With LSA, Dominique Schelcher affirms that all the brands of the PepsiCo group are involved, that is, “not only soft drinks, but also potato chips”. In fact, PepsiCo France’s portfolio is made up of Pepsi, Lipton Ice Tea, 7up, but also the brands Lays, Doritos and Cheetos.
tense negotiations
Trade negotiations between distributors and manufacturers have been especially tense this year in a context of inflation. “The negotiations were unprecedented this year with requests for increases never seen in forty years,” Dominique Schelcher laments to LSA. According to him, the big brands have asked for “price increases of 14 to 15% on average, which follow requests of 12 to 13% for the 2022 negotiations.”
“The declarations of the president of Ania (National Association of Agrifood Industries) on all televisions evoking requests from 8 to 10% by 2023 it struck me. I knew very well that it was false”, added the head of Sistema U, denouncing the manufacturers “eager to recover their margins” and “who do not take the consumer into account”.
This situation has given rise to several price disputes in recent months. At the end of 2022, Intermarché had stopped selling water from the Danone group as a sign of response to the price increases demanded by the agri-food group. “Overly complicated negotiations” also led Carrefour to pull Tropicana fruit juice from its shelves in February, with the distributor citing “major problems with this supplier.”
Source: BFM TV
