Supermarkets have criticised plans by Douwe Egberts’ mother company JDE Peet to up the price of coffee by another 15 to 25% breaking the €10 barrier for a 500 gramme pack, the FD reported on Friday.
At the beginning of this year, supermarkets Albert Heijn, Jumbo and Plus refused to accept a 20% hike and banned DE coffee from its shelves, only to give in some weeks later.
The coffee maker said failed harvests in Brazil and Vietnam are boosting costs. As a result, a 500 gramme packet of Dutch staple Aroma Rood ground coffee will now cost €10.69.
“I thought we had buried the hatchet,” Michiel Ruiter, director of online supermarket Picnic told the paper. “Coffee is becoming a very expensive product.”
Plus director Aart van Haren said the negotiations will continue to be “strained” and that the failed harvests do not justify the extent of the price hike.
In a reaction, JDE Peet said they “recognise prices have gone up because of increased costs. We have only factored in what was inevitable”.
According to Bregje Deben of the training institute De Koffieschool, €10 is not too much to pay. “I can’t see into people’s purses but we use and average of a kilo of coffee a month. That’s lots of cups of coffee,” she told broadcaster NOS.
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