Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

What I will commit to is having a conversation with the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine about what the appropriate direction here is in terms of what we should be doing together as a Government and in the context of the new regulator being set up. It is important to say that we import a lot of food from large food companies like Unilever, Nestlé and lots of others. We are a price-taker as a small, open economy that imports very large volumes of food across many products. When you speak to retailers, as I have, and talk to them about the differential in price between own-brand product and branded product, you often see a significant difference because large food companies with big brands and so on have not dropped their prices in the same way that own-brand has reduced pricing. We need to ask questions around why that is and where the profit margins are. There is an issue here, but it is primarily the remit of the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, as it was when I was in the Department. We did bring many of the companies together, for example, in the beef forum, when we did this before to understand more fully the full supply chain and how it functions.

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