For several months, it had become very difficult to find bottles of mineral water from the brands Evian, Volvic or even Badoit in certain supermarkets. In question ? A dispute difficult to resolve opposed the Danone group, to which the brands concerned belong, to the distribution giants responsible for the Intermarché, Casino, Franprix and Monoprix stores.
The disagreement concerned a potential increase in the price of bottles, as reported by our colleagues from Capital. The Danone group was indeed asking for an upward reassessment of prices, citing the increase in the price of raw materials as well as the energy to which they had to face. The boss of Intermarché initially categorically opposed it, and preferred to remove the bottles from its shelves rather than increase the price.
This large-scale retailer went far: in some branches, you could read messages in the empty shelves indicating the reason why the supermarket was not supplied. According to Intermarché, Danone was asking for a price increase of almost 22%! In recent days, however, an agreement has been reached. We therefore find all the variety of bottled mineral water in supermarkets, but their price has nevertheless increased.
According to the Intermarché group, everything has been done to limit the increase as much as possible… The results are still hard to swallow: on average, the price of packs of 6 bottles of water would have increased by almost 9% in one year. The mineral water that has increased the most is not even part of the Danone group: it is Cristalline, which has gone from 11 to 13 cents per liter over one year.
