Facua-Consumers in Action denounces a “non-aggression pact” between supermarket chains on the price of olive oil after detecting that the brands had set the same price last week, according to Europa Press.
Specifically, the consumer organization assures that after Mercadona’s announcement last week to lower the prices of olive oil, Alcampo, Carrefour and Dia followed a day later. Hipercor, Aldi and Lidl also lowered their sales prices.
“We understand that there is a non-aggression pact, we must investigate whether it is an agreement, a collusive pact that could violate the Competition Act, but even if it has not violated it, what is clear is that these supermarket chains, which they constantly repeat that they have a high level of competition in our country, that they behave in an oligopoly regime, where they even decide, in any case tacitly in agreement, not to attack and not to compete on essential products for consumers”, denounced the secretary general of Facua, Rubén Sánchez.
He also assured that after the recent fall of Mercadona, at first the other three supermarket chains imitated it “simply to not attack each other, to not compete, to not force any chain to have a much lower price than the other”, so that currently, the six supermarket chains “already charge exactly the same price for a one-litre bottle of mild or intense olive oil”.
Price drop
On Wednesday, August 21, Mercadona applied a discount in the different formats of its intense and mild olive oils. In the case of one-liter bottles, they went from 7.62 to 6.95 euros (0.67 euros less). A few hours later, the Facua platform detected that Dia, Alcampo and Carrefour were also lowering their prices to 6.95 euros.
Last Friday, it was Hipercor that lowered the price of a litre of its intense and creamy white brand olive oil from 8 to 6.95 euros, while Aldi lowered the price of its mild and intense Olearia del Olivar brand olive oil from 7.55 to 6.95 euros.
The consumer organisation warned that supermarkets were already behaving in the same way a few weeks ago with private label virgin olive oil, setting a price of 7.90 euros per one-litre bottle.
As for extra virgin olive oils, prices have not changed in recent weeks after the reduction that all the major supermarket chains applied, also in parallel, in mid-July.
Facua recalled that in July it filed a new complaint with the General Directorate of Consumer Affairs in which it revealed parallel increases and decreases in the prices of white olive oil brands from eight major supermarket chains and believes that the Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030, which made a request for information to the brands, with the information provided, could “perfectly” open a sanction file.
While regretting that the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) continues not to respond to the complaint filed in November 2023 in which it already warned against this mechanism for fixing prices for white brands of olive oil and requested the opening of an investigation in this area to determine whether the chains are violating the Competition Law. “We want there to be an investigation, a resolution and a legal and technical assessment by the competition in this regard,” said the spokesperson for Facua.
Sánchez also criticized the inaction of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and believes that “it has decided to look the other way and protect the interests of the big food industry and supermarket chains that have inflated their profit margins.” In addition, he regretted that none of the autonomous communities, which have power in this area, have announced measures in this regard, with which the 17 autonomies “are escaping their powers in the face of price increases that are seriously eroding the economy.” of consumers.
In this way, Facua reiterates that with the data collected in its analysis, it can be concluded that there is sufficient evidence to suspect the existence of irregularities in the pricing mechanisms of the eight reported supermarket chains, for which they illegally applied profit increases. margins during the different months of 2023 and 2024.
