Almost three months without a delivery. Then they agreed, and neither side said on what.

Every year, food manufacturers and supermarket chains sit down to agree on prices and conditions for the coming year. In Germany these talks are called the Jahresgespräche, the annual negotiations. Many of them are running now.

In 2022, one of them became public.

Coca-Cola wanted higher prices from 1 September. Edeka, Germany's largest food retailer, said no. From that day, Coca-Cola stopped delivering to Edeka's supermarkets and to its discount chain Netto.

Edeka went to court. On 8 September, a court in Hamburg ordered Coca-Cola to keep delivering, as a quick and temporary measure.

Three weeks later, the same court cancelled its own order. It gave two reasons. Edeka had not shown clearly enough that the new prices were unfair. And the two companies were not in the same position. If the price later turned out to be unfair, Edeka could get its money back. If Coca-Cola had been forced to sell at the old price, it could never get the difference back.

Both companies said in public what they thought the other one was doing. Edeka said many of the price demands were not based on real cost increases. Coca-Cola's Vice President Legal compared a supplier who delivers only at its own prices with a retailer who takes products off the shelf to put pressure on a supplier. In Coca-Cola’s view, it was the same move, made from opposite sides of the table.

On 25 November 2022, Coca-Cola announced that the two had reached an agreement. Edeka confirmed it. Neither said what was in it. Deliveries started again the following week. In 2023, Edeka dropped its appeal, according to Coca-Cola.

For almost three months, Edeka's customers did not find Coca-Cola on the shelf, and Coca-Cola delivered nothing to Germany's largest food retailer. What the agreement cost either side in money was never published. According to the same reports, Lidl and Aldi had accepted the new prices.

What a demand has to carry

An older case answers a question that sits underneath every one of these talks. When one side asks for something, what does it have to give in return?

In 2008, Edeka took over around 2,300 stores of the discount chain Plus. In 2009, it went back to more than 500 suppliers with three demands. It wanted the best prices Plus had ever received from them. It wanted the same payment terms Plus had had. And it wanted the suppliers to help pay for refitting the stores it had bought.

Germany's competition authority, the Bundeskartellamt, examined the demands made to sparkling wine producers and prohibited them in 2014. In January 2018, Germany’s highest civil court decided that the authority had been right: all three demands were not allowed.

I read the judgment. If a large buyer asks a supplier for something and gives nothing in return that the supplier can rely on, the demand is presumed to be unfair. That changes when the buyer gives something back that is binding and that anyone can see. The court names two examples: a guarantee to keep the supplier's products on the shelf, or a guarantee to buy a certain amount, each for a fixed period. What comes back has to be clear and concrete, and the supplier has to know about it at the moment the demand is made.

The court added two more points. It did not matter how big or strong the suppliers were. And a demand is judged as it was made, even if the two sides later reached an agreement.

The head of the Bundeskartellamt summarised it in one sentence at the time: hard negotiating is allowed, abusing market power is prohibited.

When something comes back

The third case shows the other direction.

Hit, a German supermarket chain, asked suppliers to pay for more space for their products on its shelves and for a place in new and reopened stores. In May 2024, the BLE, a federal agency that protects food suppliers from unfair trading practices, prohibited those payments. It found that the suppliers paid a clear amount, while what Hit promised in return was vague and not binding.

Hit appealed. In July 2025, a higher court in Düsseldorf cancelled the prohibition completely. Legal press reports that the court found the payments described precisely enough. I could not read the judgment myself.

The two sides of the industry still see the line differently. The association of brand manufacturers said that what a retailer gives in return must be clear and binding enough to be enforced in court. The association of food retailers welcomed the ruling and said that arbitrary, one-sided intervention in contracts between companies is not lawful.

Last Thursday I wrote about Kaufland, where demands of this kind were accepted once they came with clear conditions for the supplier.

Where my read begins

Everything above comes from courts, authorities and the companies' own statements. From here on, it is my read.

In the conversations I had this year, with people who buy and people who sell, the same frustration came up on both sides. Someone arrives with a demand and no reason behind it.

The courts drew their line in the same place.

The annual negotiations are running now, and supplier and retailer need each other in them. The supplier needs the shelf. The retailer needs the products its customers come in for.

Nobody brings a court into the room. What anyone can bring are three questions, and they work from either side of the table.

What comes back for this? For how long? Does the other side know it now, while the demand is on the table?

A demand shows what one side wants. What comes back with it shows the awareness of the cost.

I wish everyone sitting at these tables in the coming weeks clear heads and good conversations.

Tina

Before the next conversation, it can help to look back at the last one. The Negotiation Review does that for a closed negotiation or a completed conversation, alone in the tool or in a session with me.