European Union officials in Brussels this week sat down for dinner to work through a road map on how to relax the flow of goods and workers through the EU single market, according to POLITICO.
That the discussions happened over a meal is fitting, because it’s an issue well illustrated through the lens of food.
In May 2024, the European Commission issued a €337.5 million fine to Mondelēz, the food manufacturer. It said that between 2006 and 2020, the company — which makes well-known brands such as Milka, Cadbury, Oreo, and Toblerone — ran 22 separate agreements to prevent retailers from buying its products in cheaper EU countries and reselling them in more expensive ones.
A broker in Germany was cut off from supply to stop chocolate bars reaching Belgium, where Mondelēz charged more. A Dutch distributor was told not to respond to orders from other member states without prior authorization from the company.
To be clear, no one was saying just one company has engaged in this kind of practice. It’s just one the EU highlighted. Mondelēz even described those cited actions as isolated incidents, but the practice, in general has a specific name: territorial supply constraints.
Square peg, round hole
Despite more than three decades of talk about a single market, territorial supply constraints are one of the big reasons food prices across the EU vary so much between the cheapest and most expensive member states. Eurostat data from 2024 helps illustrate the gap.
The Same Grocery Basket, 27 Different Prices
Food price levels across EU member states in 2024, indexed to the EU average (= 100). A score above 100 means food costs more than the EU average; below means less. The spread exists despite three decades of single market integration.
So how are gaps like this possible? Part of the story is that large consumer goods manufacturers produce their products at a handful of respective facilities across the EU. Then, they sell to national subsidiaries, which in turn sell to national retailers at prices that vary by country. As laid out by the European Commission, contracts between these players often prohibit cross-border sourcing. A retailer in Germany couldn’t legally buy the cheaper Belgian version of the same product and stock it on German shelves.
In that system, the single market effectively exists for the manufacturer, but not everyday shoppers.
A 2020 study commissioned by the European Commission estimated the practice was costing consumers at least €14 billion annually across a handful of product categories, including breakfast cereals, confectionary treats, dairy, and soft drinks. Manufacturers disputed the figure and the full cost. Still, five years later, the EU named Territorial Supply Constraints one of the “Terrible Ten” most harmful barriers to the single market.
That brings us up to now. Earlier this month, a call for a deeper dive into the issue surfaced. Where that goes remains to be seen, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a legislative proposal could come before the end of the year.
What about those rich countries?
If you were also curious about how the top-end of that chart above fleshed out, you might also have assumed that expensive food is simply a function of wealthy countries, that rich people pay more for everything, including groceries. But if you look more closely at the EU’s eleven most expensive food countries against GDP per capita, a more complex reality unfolds.
Richer Doesn’t Always Mean Pricier Food — But It Usually Does
The 11 EU countries with the highest food price levels, plotted against GDP per capita. Bubble size represents population. EU average = 100 on both axes. The correlation is real — but three countries break it in interesting ways.
The broad correlation holds. Wealthier countries do tend to have higher food prices, driven by wages, retail costs, and consumer preference for premium products. But two significant outliers break the pattern. France and Italy both sit at or below the EU average for GDP per capita, yet both pay above-average food prices. These are not rich countries overpaying for luxury goods, they are average-income countries overpaying for the same products their neighbors produce in the same factories.
Meanwhile, check out Ireland and Luxembourg sitting way over at the far right of the chart with high average GDP figures. Don’t be fooled. Ireland’s number is so inflated by multinational profit-shifting that the country invented a replacement statistic to say what it actually means. Luxembourg’s owes a debt to 230,000 daily commuters who produce output that counts as Luxembourgish and then drive home to France, Belgium, and Germany to spend it.
Ultimately, the food price gap is not a consequence of economic structure. It’s partly a consequence of commercial policy, those contracts that prevent a genuine single market from taking shape.
The European Commission’s roadmap, if it delivers, could change that. The question is whether thirty years of entrenched commercial arrangements can be unwound by a legislative proposal from Brussels, and whether the manufacturers who built those arrangements will simply find new ways to maintain them.