Following frank pressure from Bercy, 75 major manufacturers have pledged to lower prices on certain daily consumer products from July, Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on RMC and BFMTV on Friday.
“Very directly on the shelves of a certain number of products where wholesale prices have gone down, prices will also have to go down 2, 3, 5, maybe up to 10% on certain products,” he says. For the minister, “pasta is a good example of a product whose price should drop significantly in the coming weeks.”
A perspective confirmed by Albert Mathieu, CEO of the Panzani group, number one in pasta in France. In an interview in Parisianhe assures that “we will do it, because for us it is important to send a strong signal to stop the rise in prices, or even to lower them”.
+38% for the pasta shells package between 2021 and 2023
When? “July 1. On this date, there will be a reduction in the price of our Panzani pasta, admittedly slight, of a few cents, but that will mark a turning point. It will be a strong signal. And then, in a second step, from October, we will be able to intensify these reductions, if and only if the expected harvests, in Canada in particular, take place.
Asked about the general increase in the price of his products, Albert Mathieu specified that “the package of pasta shells, which is our flagship product, was at 76 cents in July 2021, the price increase reached 38%. We are online with the pasta market (+34%)”.
However, for jars of tomato sauce, another star product of the brand, we should not count on a rapid price drop.
“We need 100,000 tons (of tomatoes, editor’s note) each year, where France produces ‘only’ 140,000 tons, which means we import a lot of tomatoes from Spain and Italy. However, between last summer and the summer of 2023, the prices will have dropped from 100 to 150 euros per ton. Added to this is the price of glass, which has doubled… Although there are signs of a decline for pulp, there are still strong inflationary pressures in many other inputs,” he explains.
Finally, given the criticism of the sharp rise in gross margins since the start of the fall in the wholesale prices of certain raw materials, the manager stressed that “this does not worry us. Our margins have not yet returned to the level prior to the first crisis (summer 2021)”.
Source: BFM TV
