Carrefour CEO says inflation crisis seeing consumers snub organic food
Cost-conscious French consumers are ditching fish, buying cheaper meat and snubbing organic food to save money on their shopping, the head of Europe’s largest food retailer said on Tuesday.
Carrefour Chief Executive Alexandre Bompard said economists’ debates about when inflation would peak were futile, and what mattered was consumers’ new, entrenched penny-pinching approach to shopping.
“You make choices in favour of the lowest prices, sales. I’m not going to buy beef, but the cheapest pork; I’m not going to buy fish; I’m not going to buy organics,” Bompard said.
“This phenomenon is here and it’s deep and it’s been gaining momentum in recent weeks,” he told a round table at the Medef French employers federation annual post-summer conference.
He said Carrefour and its competitors in the food industry had been adapting to the new frugal mindset with promotional campaigns to freeze prices on a range of everyday products.
Inflation has surged to record levels in major economies over the last year, due at first to strained post-COVID supply chains and more recently to sky-rocketing energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
Inflation in Carrefour’s home market France hit 6.8% in July, the highest rate since France began using European Union methodology to calculate the data in the early 1990s.
Farming Independent.ie
Read full article Share on twitter