ROMA (ITALPRESS) – The Authority of Competition and Market has launched a cognitive survey on the role played by the great organized distribution (GDO) within the agri-food chain, also taking inspiration from the net divarication, which has been determined in recent years, between general inflation and food inflation.
In particular, on the basis of ISTAT data, between October 2021 and October 2025 food prices increased by 24.9%, higher than almost 8 percentage points compared to that recorded in the same period by the general consumer price index (equal to 17.3%).
“In the face of these increases in consumer prices, agricultural producers often complain of a compression or, at least, an inadequate growth of their margins, which could be partly due to the strong imbalance in the contractual power of farmers compared to the large chains of the large organized distribution – the Antitrust emphasizes in a note –. As part of the agro-food chain, the chain link represented by the exchange phase between end distributors and suppliers is a crucial hub, both for the determination of the level of remuneration of suppliers – and, consequently, of the profitability of the production activities upstream – and for the definition of the trend of consumer prices”.
In this context, the survey aims to deepen, among other things, “the mode of exercise of purchasing power by the GDO chains, also through different forms of non-corporative aggregation (cooperative, central and supercentral); the request to suppliers, by the distribution chains, of considerations for the purchase of the services of sale (such as the insertion in assortment, the modalities of placement of the products to shelves, promotions, the launch of new products, that is the so-called trade spending); the increasing importance of the impact of branded products of the distributor (the so-called Private Label)”.
“The issues related to the exercise of purchasing power by distribution chains have a competitive importance also because the management of purchases and the sale of services to suppliers, as well as the supply and positioning of Private Label products, represent an important strategic lever of downstream competition between GDO operators and directly affect the dynamics of final price formation,” concludes the Authority.
-Photo IPA Agency-
(ITALPRESS).
