Retail in the food sector - Category management: The French Competition Authority issues a mixed opinion on the implementation of category management agreements between suppliers and retailers in the mass retail distribution (Food retail sector)

*This article is an automatic translation of the original article, provided here for your convenience. Read the original article. This opinion follows a self-referral by the Competition Authority on 19 March 2010. The Authority's objective is to assess the competitive risks associated with the implementation of this form of cooperation between distributors and suppliers, which is category management, and which consists of the distributor entrusting the total or partial management of a department to one of its suppliers. In order to study precisely the practices implemented in this context, the Authority sent a questionnaire to 77 suppliers to the food-dominated large-scale distribution sector, a large proportion of which were small and medium-sized enterprises, and to question a