Supermarket chains are brute-forcing Nutri-Score – at farmers’ expense

As European farmers struggle to stay afloat amid market volatility and unfair competition, the EU’s recently-unveiled Vision for Agriculture and Food has faced its first test. On 13 March, MEPs debated the Commission’s long-term roadmap, pressing for details on its integration into the post-2027 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the level of agriculture funding the sector can expect in the next multiannual financial framework.

Opening the debate, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen set out the Commission’s top priority of delivering an “attractive and predictable agri-food sector that ensures a fair standard of living” for farmers, stressing that the Commission will simplify and better target future CAP support to producers most in need. Beyond attractiveness, Hansen asserted the EU executive’s ambition to make the bloc’s agri-food system “competitive, future-proof…fair and built on dialogue and partnership between the players of the food chain.

“Yet, with supermarket giants continuing to squeeze farmers with unfair trading practices – some of which are evolving in new and damaging ways – the Commission must ensure that its upcoming plans to overhaul the CAP and boost farmer’s supply chain positions are followed with concrete actions.

EU launching fight against retailers’ unfair practices

Over the past year, the European Commission has placed farmers’ bargaining power at the heart of its agricultural policy, recognising that fair remuneration is essential for the sector’s long-term resilience. In April 2024, the EU executive published a report assessing the enforcement of the Unfair Trading Practices (UTP) Directive across the bloc’s food supply chain. Adopted in 2019 to protect farmers from the exploitative practices of major supermarkets and food processors, the UTP Directive bans 16 harmful practices on farmers and smaller suppliers.

The Commission’s report notably flags late payments as the most common abuse, affecting both perishable (50%) and non-perishable (13%) products, with other major violations including suppliers being forced to cover marketing costs (7%), pay for the stocking, displaying and listing of their products (7%), and make payments unrelated to a specific sale (7%). The retail sector accounted for the majority of these unfair practices (41%), followed by food processors (36%) and wholesalers (22%).

To tackle identified enforcement gaps, the Commission unveiled two proposals in December 2024: revisions of the Common Market Organisation (CMO) Regulation to increase pricing and contract transparency, and of the UTP Directive to improve protections for smaller farms and food businesses dealing with larger buyers.

While farmers’ associations have welcomed the new proposals, such as the creation of a mutual assistance mechanism for information exchange between national authorities to bolster cross-border UTP enforcement, the sector has called for deeper reforms, especially a ban on below-cost purchasing – a large retailer practice that, as the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has recently warned, continues to push farmers to the brink.

Supermarkets’ Nutri-Score adoption presenting new threat

Concerningly, Brussels’s growing push to protect farmers’ bargaining power is now being met by a new threat inflicted on small producers by major supermarket chains: the unilateral, mandatory adoption of France’s controversial Nutri-Score label. In early March, Dutch retailer Albert Heijn announced plans to extend the controversial labelling system across all its products in the Netherlands, following similar moves from French supermarket giants LeClerc and Carrefour. Beyond forcing its suppliers to publish Nutri-Score data on their website, Carrefour has even vowed to name and shame those who refuse.

Seemingly anticipating the blowback, Albert Heijn insists that it has “informed our suppliers about this initiative and are actively involving them in this step,” and that “most suppliers understand the importance of transparency towards consumers and support the initiative.” Yet, given the mounting opposition to Nutri-Score from EU food producers, this statement rings hollow and rather smacks of another top-down imposition from large retailers on small farmers long disadvantaged by Nutri-Score’s biased algorithm.

The French labelling system has been widely criticised for its unfair ratings, hitting PDO-certified cheeses, cured meats and other EU heritage foods with excessively-negative scores that mislead consumers and threaten farmers’ livelihoods. Nutri-Score’s latest algorithm changes are even more baffling, downgrading nutrient-rich products like whole milk and prunes from an A to a C. These absurd scores notably reflect French research findings questioning the system’s capacity to guide consumers to key nutrients for a healthy, balanced diet, yet supermarkets continue to blindly push the label.

While the Commission has sent strong recent signals in leaving the EU-wide mandatory nutrition label proposal and Nutri-Score out of its new agri-food vision and work programme, it must not allow supermarkets to override its decisions and undercut emerging efforts to bolster farmers’ incomes.

Recipe for farmers’ long-term financial resilience

Without stronger action, large supermarkets will continue undermining the financial viability and competitiveness of the EU’s agricultural sector. While the Commission’s recent proposals represent a key step towards supply chain fairness for the bloc’s small farms – which account for nearly two-thirds of the sector but a small minority of CAP funding – its impact hinges on effective implementation and enforcement.

In a late-February opinion commissioned by the Polish EU Council Presidency, the EESC offers a promising way forward, recommending the creation of an EU digital centre to track market prices, production costs, and profit margins across the food supply chain. This transparency push would strengthen farmers’ bargaining power, alongside new policies allowing collective price negotiations, increased funding for cooperatives and a ban on below-cost purchases – a move inspired by Spain’s successful food chain laws.

Since last year, Spain and France have led the charge, calling for an EU-wide regulation to mirror their national protections against supermarket exploitation. Now, the Commission, the Polish EU Council Presidency and willing member states must seize the opportunity to shield farmers from unfair practices and make agriculture a viable, attractive career path for younger generations – a key priority of the EU’s new agri-food roadmap.

While promising, the EU’s Vision for Agriculture and Food will mean little if it fails to protect farmers from the relentless pressure of unfair supermarket tactics. Moving forward, the Commission must act decisively to strengthen the agricultural sector’s bargaining power and ensure fair incomes, or else risk an irreversible decline of Europe’s agricultural resilience and competitiveness.