Annual negotiations: Jumbo clashes with Haribo and Coca-Cola

Jumbo joins the list of retailers where price negotiations with brand suppliers are particularly tough this year. As a result, Haribo already finds its products missing from the shelves and Coca-Cola (and other brands) may follow suit.

Clashes

The Dutch supermarket chain does not want to accept price increases it considers to be too high, leading to empty spaces on shelves. For several days now, there have been no sweets from Haribo in the chain’s supermarkets, while Coca-Cola is also said to have stopped deliveries. Moreover, Jumbo is at loggerheads with a crisps producer and a number of beer brands.

“It is true that products from Haribo and Coca-Cola are currently available on a limited basis. Talks about 2024 have not yet been finalised with both suppliers”, a Jumbo spokesperson told Distrifood. These conflicts do not come unexpectedly: when announcing the annual figures last week, CEO Ton van Veen already said that the retailer wants to focus more on low prices, expecting a lot from the purchasing partnerships Everest and Epic Partners.

More delistings to come

The same clashes are happening across the whole European food retail sector. Belgian Colruyt saw empty shelves after difficult discussions with big brand manufacturers like AB InBev, Unilever and Mars. Last week, Carrefour did the same with products from PepsiCo in France as well as in Belgium, Poland, Spain and Italy.

After two years of high inflation, food retailers are fiercely resisting the new price increases that A-brands want to push through. With commodity prices falling and energy prices stabilising, they are demanding that consumer prices fall again. They also want to restore their own margins, which have shrunk sharply in recent years. In turn, manufacturers point to sharply increased labour costs and argue that they are not passing on all cost increases. Observers therefore do expect more clashes in the sector in the coming weeks.