Picnic is continuing its fight against European ‘procurement walls’. The Dutch online supermarket has sourced fifty popular A-brand products in Germany, with markedly lower prices for its Dutch customers as a result.
‘Manufacturers use tricks’
Four 1.5 litre bottles of Coca Cola regular or zero will cost just 6.99 euros this week, instead of 9.65 euros. A 750 gram jar of Nutella is down to 4.99 euros, rather than 7.14 euros. The online supermarket bought the products on the German market, where many products are considerably cheaper than in the Netherlands, and put Dutch-language ingredient stickers over the German labels.
Not listing the ingredients in Dutch is one of the tricks used by manufacturers to prevent cross-border sourcing, according to Picnic. “In the European Union, there is free movement of goods”, co-founder Michiel Muller explains: “Manufacturers benefit from this by producing as cheaply as possible in a central location, but they throw up blockades when supermarkets want their customers to benefit from this advantage. This really has to stop and we will continue the fight.”
The procurement walls that manufacturers erect to make it impossible for supermarkets to source cheaper across the border are the subject of plenty of debate in the Netherlands. Supermarkets and manufacturers had to come and answer to the standing committee on economic affairs a few weeks ago about the large price differences with Germany. MP Jesse Klaver questioned why the same bottle of Nivea sunscreen costs 26.50 euros in the Netherlands, but just 8.95 euros in Germany.
