Manufacturers and Distributors, united to design the future of the Great Consumption

Publications Alimarket, a leader in sectoral economic information, brings together the Mapfre Auditorium to eleven speakers and more than 250 attendees from the main companies of the Big Consumption to envision a collaborative business model in which manufacturers and distributors benefit.

The day began with the Director of General of Millward Brown, Pepe Martínez, who explained the situation in which the sector is located. Martinez stressed that “55% of consumers have switched to white brands”, which has led to a devaluation of the sector.

Representatives of distribution companies such as Carrefour, Coviran, Grupo El Árbol, or Dinosol Supermercados talked about why they need traditional brands, even though their own brands have grown so much. “Customers ask us to have the leading brands,” explains Javier Pérez de Leza, CEO of Dinosol Supermarkets. For his part, Jorge Ybarra, Carrefour’s Director of Consumer Products, emphasizes that “at Carrefour we want to constantly surprise the customer and in this field we need collaboration with manufacturers”.

The manufacturers have had to adapt to this new reality in which the brand of the distributor has become the hardest of the competitions. In Corporación Alimentaria Peñasanta (Central Lechera Asturiana), they bet on maintaining quality by lowering prices, launching the message “now that we are in crisis, we help you”, according to José Armando Tellado, CEO of the company. In Procter & Gamble they use consumer psychology to simplify, guide and seduce the buyer at the point of sale and thus facilitate the task, as explained by its Commercial Director, Enrique García. Other sectors, such as olive oil, are doing worse. “The oil is sometimes in the linear below the price of production, so it is very difficult to invest in innovation and research,” declares Antonio Luque, General Director of Hojiblanca. Even so, it recognizes that for its part, the consumer is not sufficiently well on the benefits of olive oil, although this is also due to the lack of resources. The whiting that bites its tail.

The day served to share the concerns of both parties and design a model of beneficial cooperation for manufacturers and distributors, and thus face an increasingly uncertain future for the Great Consumption