Publicly-owned supermarkets ‘not a good idea’ according to Spanish distribution chains

A POLITICAL party’s proposal to create a chain of publicly-owned supermarkets would be unworkable, Spain’s Manufacturers and Distributors Association (AECOC) said.

The Podemos party’s scheme was “out of touch with reality”, it was “post-truth” and “contributed nothing”, AECOC’s director general Jose Maria Bonmatí declared.

He also lamented that Podemos’s secretary general Ione Belarra had labelled food distribution bosses as “capos.”

Spain’s National Statistics’ Institute (INE) announced that prices rose by 16.5 per cent in March, and Belarra’s latest outburst had irritated the sector, Bonmatí explained, as prices had risen owing to higher costs and their profit margins had suffered.

Government figures submitted to the European commission have demonstrated that 95 per cent of Spain’s food inflation was the result of the higher price of imported raw materials in 2022.  The steep rise was not due to internal problems in the food supply chain, the report emphasised.

“A public supermarket would contribute nothing in a sector that is enormously complex,” Bonmati said, speaking in Madrid on May 9.  “Many links are involved and it must be taken into account that this is a sector with a great deal of competition.

The AECOC chief also maintained that there were “all kinds of commercial offers” in Spain and that the consumer had an “enormous capacity” to choose.

“I can’t see that this proposal would contribute much of value, not when there are so many operators who offer affordable products,” Bonmatí concluded in reference to Belarra’s proposal for a chain of publicly-owned supermarkets.