France announces more food price caps, takes aim at multinational firms

By Joseph Ataman, CNN

Paris (CNN) — The number of price-capped products in French supermarkets will double to 5,000, finance minister Bruno Le Maire said Thursday, as data revealed another month of double-digit food inflation.

Speaking to French broadcaster France2, Le Maire also criticized several multinational companies, including Unilever (UL) and PepsiCo (PEP), for not doing enough to help French consumers.

The price caps, agreed with producers and distributors, aim “to definitively break the spiral of food prices,” he said, noting that the affected products made up around a quarter of a typical supermarket’s offerings.

In June, Le Maire said 75 top food companies had agreed to cut prices on hundreds of products from July in line with declines in raw material costs.

But, on Thursday, he said many distributors were failing to pass on their savings to customers and announced an obligatory, immediate drop in supermarket prices on items where producers had also lowered prices.

These measures and industry commitments will be backed up by checks and sanctions, he added.

Le Maire slammed “big industrial groups” for doing little to help French consumers with high prices, singling out Unilever, Nestle and PepsiCo for doing “a bit, but not much.”

Without mentioning specific firms, he also criticized companies that boast of cutting prices while lowering them only by fractions of a percent.

“The French need [for prices] to really and concretely drop,” Le Maire said, adding that “cheating practices,” such as reducing the weight or volume of products but keeping the price unchanged, must stop.

According to provisional data released by the country’s statistics institute Thursday, French food prices rose 11.1% this month compared with a year ago, less than they did in July but still more than double the rate of overall inflation.

— Olesya Dmitracova contributed to this article.

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