Italy’s competition authority is to investigate the purchasing power of the country’s large retailers.
In a statement yesterday (14 January), the Autorita’ Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) said it had launched the probe “in view of the widening gap between overall inflation and food price inflation recorded in recent years”.
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Citing data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics, the AGCM said food prices increased 24.9% between October 2021 and October 2025. It said the rate was nearly eight percentage points more than the 17.3% increase recorded in the same timeframe by the general consumer price index in Italy.
The group also said regular reports from agricultural producers of “squeezed margins” or “insufficient margin growth” could be “partly due to the strong imbalance in bargaining power between farmers and major large-scale retail chains”.
“In the agri-food supply chain, the trading stage between final distributors and suppliers plays a pivotal role, as it affects both the level of remuneration of suppliers – and, as a result, the profitability of upstream production activities – and consumer price trends,” the antitrust regulator said.
Speaking to Italian news agency Askanews, Carlo Alberto Buttarelli, the president of trade association Federdistribuzione, said retailers had acted as a “barrier to inflation” during a period when prices “spiked”.
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By GlobalDataThrough its probe, the AGCM will assess how large-scale retail chains exercise their buying power, “including through non-corporate aggregation arrangements”, such as buying groups, “super-buying groups” and cooperatives.
The investigation will also look at how large retailers might wield their buying power through fees charged to suppliers for services like listings, product launches, and promotions.
It also intends to analyse “the increasing importance” of private-label.
Major retail chains in Italy include Esselunga, Coop, Carrefour and Lidl. The AGCM did not disclose which specific retailers would be included in its investigation.
Stakeholders have been asked to submit feedback to the competition authority by the end of this month.
“We have often been alone in combating price increases, trying to limit the transmission of these increases to consumer prices, and we will reiterate this to the authority,” Buttarelli told Askanews. “We received the anti-trust authority’s information on this fact-finding investigation before Christmas and we will respond without hesitation based on all the evidence presented.”
Buying groups have come under scrutiny from competition authorities elsewhere in Europe this year.
Last week, the French competition watchdog announced a review of the Aura and Concordis buying alliances.
L’Autorité de la Concurrence said it will seek to establish whether the alliances bring any harm to competition, including upstream and downstream, and from a consumer viewpoint.
Aura was the first of the two alliances to be launched, featuring French grocers Intermarché, Auchan and Casino. They formed the purchasing cooperation agreement in 2024 for branded and private-label consumer goods.
Last year, Aura also joined the wider European purchasing groups Everest and Epic Partners. Edeka, Picnic and Système U are part of the former while Esselunga and Migros feature in the latter.
Concordis was initially launched last year for branded products between France’s Carrefour and Coopérative U, with Germany’s alliance group RTG International joining in August. It is due to get off the ground this year.
