Retail chain Carrefour announced in a press release on Thursday evening that it was withdrawing PepsiCo products from its supermarkets in Italy, Spain and Belgium, not just its domestic market in France, Reuters reported.

A Carrefour representative said on Thursday morning that only stores in France would display a message on the shelves of PepsiCo products saying “we no longer sell this brand due to unacceptable price increases”, but the French retailer reversed course last night to clarify. that the same message will also be displayed in its supermarkets in the other 3 countries.

The decision will affect more than 9,000 Carrefour supermarkets, equivalent to two-thirds of all stores worldwide, according to the latest annual report published by the company.

After initially declining to comment on the report, PepsiCo said in a press release that “we have been in discussions with Carrefour for months and will continue to work in good faith to ensure the availability of our products.”

PepsiCo products have already disappeared from some Carrefour supermarkets

Reuters noted that some PepsiCo products, such as Cheetos and 7Up, were no longer available at the supermarket in the 16th arrondissement of Paris on Thursday, while others, such as Pepsi, were still on the shelves with a note to shoppers.

Edith Carpentier, a Parisian who was approached by journalists in a supermarket, welcomed Carrefour’s move.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all. I think there’s going to be a lot of products that stay on the shelves because they’ve become too expensive, and those are things that we can avoid,” she said.

With the French government threatening retailers with tough measures if they don’t cut prices after raw material costs return to normal levels, Carrefour last year launched an anti-inflation campaign by sticking stickers on items that had shrunk in sizes, but they kept their prices. .

Retailers claim that they cannot lower prices on their own, they are obliged by contracts with suppliers to sell with a certain margin in order not to incur losses. Instead, food industry companies say that the price increases they make are due to the increase in costs they pass on to primary producers.

But several recent large-scale analyzes have shown that even as commodity prices have fallen, retail prices in some countries have remained flat or even increased.