Why a French supermarket chain dropped PepsiCo drinks and snacks over high prices

If we have one complaint about the retail beat, it’s that it sometimes lacks the emotional stakes of middle school dances, rife as they are with the eye-watering scent of Axe body spray and unfiltered teenaged melodrama.

But we have no complaints at the moment, thanks to Carrefour, the French supermarket chain with locations throughout Europe. Carrefour got into a dust-up with PepsiCo that no chaperone—fight! fight! fight!—stepped in to break up.

Citing PepsiCo repeatedly raising prices, Carrefour pulled its products, replacing them with signs that, according to a translation from Reuters, read, “We are no longer selling this brand due to unacceptable price increases.”

Among the brands to which Carrefour said au revoir: Pepsi and Lipton beverages, Doritos, Cheetos, and Lay’s.

“We’ve been in discussion with Carrefour for many months and we will continue to engage in good faith in order to try to ensure that our products are available,” an unnamed PepsiCo spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal.

That good faith soon appeared to waver, however, when Pepsi did the same thing with the stakes as it did with its prices: It raised them.

Bargaining chips: “PepsiCo, grocery giant bicker over who dumped whom” read the WSJ headline in a follow-up story.

“Regrettably, Carrefour has mischaracterized the chain of events,” an unnamed PepsiCo spokesperson told the paper. “Given the lack of agreement on a new contract, we stopped supplying to Carrefour at the end of the year, something they were aware could happen.”

To which Carrefour responded in the same article with an I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I rejoinder: “We, at the Carrefour Group, have taken this decision.”

What’s not in dispute is that PepsiCo has, indeed, been raising prices:

• When the company hiked prices by an average of 11% in Q3, which ended in September, it marked its seventh straight quarter of double-digit price hikes, according to the Associated Press.

Déjà SKU: It’s not the first time Carrefour has used shelf signage to name and shame brands for their inflation-related strategies.

As Retail Brew reported in September, in response to shrinkflation, manufacturers’ practice of making products smaller rather than raising prices, Carrefour festooned shelves with signs warning shoppers that products had been shrinkflated.

The signs, as translated from the French by The Grocer, read, “This product has seen its weight drop and the price charged by our supplier increase. We are committed to renegotiating this price.”

The signs excoriated at least 122 products, including some made by PepsiCo.

Having seen no instances of US supermarkets similarly calling out products for shrinkflation with shelf signage, we conducted a readership poll at the time to see if retail insiders thought supermarkets on these shores should do so, too.

No fewer than 88.5% of respondents said supermarkets should warn consumers about products that have been shrinkflated, while just 10.4% said they shouldn’t.