The terms were signed once. They decide who carries the risk.
In German food retail there is a conversation once a year where a supplier and a buyer agree what the year looks like. It has a name, das Jahresgespräch, and it has a date in the calendar.
The terms in this story sit in a different document. A standing conditions agreement, signed once, that decides what happens on the ordinary days afterwards.
Here is one of them, as it stood.
Where the commercial success of delivered agricultural and food products fell short of expectations, dm could take those products off the list at any time. Stock still sitting in the distribution centres and the stores could go back to the supplier against a credit note, or dm could clear it in a way its own wording called ertragsneutral.
That sentence decides who carries the risk when a product does not sell.
A supplier protected under the German supply chain law considered himself disadvantaged by those terms, and he wrote to the Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung.
The authority examined the agreement on three grounds. The return of unsold products. Unilateral change to the contract. Costs moved onto the supplier. It also applied the anti-circumvention rule that came in during the autumn of 2024.
dm signalled early that it wanted an agreed ending. It stopped the objected practices immediately and produced an amended conditions agreement, with an undertaking to roll it out to all protected suppliers in the last quarter of 2025. The authority closed the proceeding on 6 October 2025.
Three things look different in the amended version.
Returns are limited to products that are still saleable for at least twelve months. The right to delist at any time is modified, with an appropriate minimum listing period guaranteed. And the rules on clearing store stock at a discount are rewritten, so a supplier can work out in advance what it costs him if he takes a share of that while the space goes to something more promising.
None of those three is a price.
The authority names the principle underneath its own file. Under this law the sales risk for ordered and properly delivered goods is meant to sit with the buyer, because the buyer decides the quantity and the buyer decides the sell-through.
That principle is available at the table as well. A supplier can bring the same sentence into the conversation where the conditions are agreed.
And the three clauses can be asked for there too. Twelve months of saleability. A minimum listing period. Markdown rules that can be costed in advance.
In this case they arrived through a federal file. At the table they are three clauses like any other.
Every clause that moved here was about who carries the risk when the product does not sell. Terms like these are signed at the start and felt much later, on a Tuesday, when a product is sitting in a distribution centre.
And the amended version was undertaken for all protected suppliers, which says something about the shape of the thing. One set of terms, written once, meeting each supplier separately.
What is not in this story is the person. The authority names the buyer and protects the complainant, which is how the regime is built. I do not know what he sells, how long he argued before he wrote, or whether he still supplies dm.
And what reaches the public record at all is the disagreement that went outside the room. The conversations that work are not written down anywhere I can read, which is worth holding next to any story of this kind, this one included.
The earlier we place the start, the more of it is inside our preparation.
The opening in this story was a conditions agreement, signed once, before any product sat unsold in a distribution centre.
Be well, Tina
Eleven patterns from conversations I had this year, about what actually decides a negotiation. One edition every Tuesday, then it ends.
