French retailer Carrefour has signed an agreement for a new Carrefour 'Quality Line' specialising in spelt flour in the Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne region with two local stakeholders.
The Degrange mill and the Dauphinoise cooperative will work with the supermarket chain to offer new spelt flour bread products, which have nutritional elements which ‘reflect consumer demand’. It possesses a low gluten content.
The three-year partnership involves 1,000 tonnes of grain, with a goal of doubling volumes and cultivated surface areas within the time period of the agreement.
Food Transition
The deal is part of Carrefour’s new food transition initiative, which promotes more responsible production and consumption processes, such as environmentally friendly farming methods and a better distribution of value for producers.
Spelt is a crop which has low input requirements - as it requires less fertiliser - and is less vulnerable to disease, the retailer said.
The Dauphinoise cooperative is made up of 40 farmers from the Savoie, Rhône, and Isère regions. It sowed two hundred acres of spelt last autumn as part of the initiative, which will be harvested this summer.
The Degrange mill is the next step in the supply chain, and has purchased appropriate equipment needed to turn spelt into flour (which provides optical sorting and husking of the spelt grain).
Investing In Production
Carrefour said that it is ‘committed to a price that takes into account actual production costs.’
‘The banner’s commitment gives visibility to producers and allows partners to invest in their production tool in order to manage the supply chain as a whole,’ the company said in a release.
Carrefour will offer baguettes and bread made from 100% French spelt flour in all of its hypermarkets and some supermarkets from January of next year.
At the start of June, Carrefour Poland introduced its first organic private-label rye and wheat bread offerings in two hypermarkets in the country.
© 2018 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Karen Henderson. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
