This month, we look at the insights of Sylvain Kockmann, a Soliance Alimentaire consultant specializing in merchant equipment, on the subject of National Interest Markets. Through his expertise, we will try to understand the stakes of these markets with such a particular status. We will first explain what the MINs are and how they work, we will detail the actors who take part in them, and then the stakes that are linked to them, whether in France or internationally.
General interest markets, or MINs, are what we callwholesale markets : they are reserved for professionals, which is why access is controlled.
Created in the 1960s, they are of "national interest" because the competition that they force by grouping wholesalers in the same place (by law) prevents speculation and maintains prices at the most accurate level of the supply/demand meeting through the transparent circulation of price information. The importance of these systems becomes clear when one works in developing countries where they do not exist: the intermediaries are all-powerful, which is far from being the case here, contrary to popular belief. Moreover, their infrastructure contributes to the security of food supply in cities by pooling investments in standardization, conservation (cold) and logistical performance.
There are about thirty of them in France and two types can be distinguished according to their macro-geographic location: on the one hand, shipping markets located in the heart of agricultural production areas (they are used to gather production to be shipped throughout France and for export); on the other hand, consumer markets, historically located in the heart of large cities . The latter aim to supply the local trade network (all retailers, but also restaurant owners and more globally all the actors of the distribution and the food industry). It should be noted that the GMS have their own logistics and this circuit weighing approximately 80% of the consumption the MIN thus lost their weight in the global consumption.
The best known MIN is the Rungis market south of Paris, which supplies the entire Paris region. Symbolizing its importance, more than 12,000 people work there every day, for a turnover of over 10 billion euros.
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The MINs host a wide variety of operators and companies on site, as they are the meeting place for producers, transporters, wholesalers and buyers. They are very important economic poles for the communities. For example, the Soliance team worked a few years ago on the Montpellier wholesale market: the MIN was the largest employment area in the city, excluding the civil service.
These infrastructures have a very important economic weight in terms of employment. This is reflected in the network of operators on these wholesale markets with a wide variety of economic players.
The face of shipping markets is of course linked to the agricultural landscape in which they are located, as well as to the nature of import flows. For example, the Perpignan market reflects the production of fruit and vegetables from the south of France, Spain and Morocco. However, there are a number of markets that have managed to diversify their activity into other sectors, such as seafood, meat or dairy products for example. They are able to offer their market a diversity of product ranges that is quite rich and therefore contributes to their attractiveness.
The Soliance Alimentaire team operates on wholesale markets in France and abroad: the stakes are of course not the same.
In France, the challenge is not so much the development of new infrastructures (even if small local market projects are emerging here and there) but rather the support of existing tools, particularly in their ability to meet the needs of operators and the evolution of new consumption patterns.
There is also an important issue of the ability to attract new funding:
The MINs are often confronted with an ageing of their operators. There is therefore a subject of renewal:
The final challenge for wholesale markets is their ability to remain attractive. To do so, they must develop their capacity to attract new players and diversify both their product and service offer. This permanent evolution must allow them to respond to the largest number of users and buyers who come to these markets to buy foodstuffs.
Discover another episode of our podcast series: food shortages in France and in the world: what you need to know.
Internationally, the challenge is to create new infrastructures. Markets and wholesale activities as such already exist but are often carried out in a disorganized manner and without any strategy for optimizing and securing food flows. They generate significant nuisances in terms of congestion, transport, waste, insecurity or even loss of foodstuffs.
It is often in the interest of these communities to relocate these wholesale activities to suitable "adoc" sites in economic activity zones, but also to design facilities that are adapted to the needs of the operators.
So there are two important issues:
The deployment of these infrastructures is generally carried out in areas where land pressure is extremely high. Planning investments for the next 15 to 20 years is often very complicated to meet this challenge.
The other difficulty is to design infrastructures and equipment that meet both the current needs of operators so that they agree to come (whether in their sales practices or in terms of organization and operation), but also future needs; the infrastructure must induce and allow for desired business developments such as standardization and health safety, for example.
The recurring problem is "how to involve operators in the process of deploying the project" to ensure the transfer of activity and the opening of markets. It is therefore necessary to structure all the phases of consultation and animationaround the project to enable this transfer of activity. This translates into the implementation of a certain number of actions and policies that provide strong incentives to facilitate this transfer and ensure the successful opening and operation of the market.
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Soliance assists its clients in 3 main areas:
Very early on in an infrastructure project, Soliance alimentaire studies all the feasibility elements of a new infrastructure project. This involves quantifying and qualifying the volumes of goods and operators in order to design the appropriate tool and identify the conditions for success.
This is what we do in particular on our international missions where the team intervenes in the upstream phases of major investment projects. We have worked in Africa (Egypt, Ivory Coast), in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius, Madagascar) and in Asia with Vietnam, often as subcontractors to Semmaris, the company that manages Rungis and exports its know-how internationally.
The Soliance alimentaire team can also take on the role of expertise and decision support for the deployment of financing and development programs for new infrastructures. For example, Soliance alimentaire has accompanied a technical assistance program in Madagascar, in the city of Fianarantsoa, in the implementation of a financing program for various market facilities.
The missions are more about strategic advice,prospective analysis, and even theelaboration of master plans with a 10 or 15 year horizon. There is a whole project of real estate programming and modernization of infrastructures in order to meet the needs of existing operators as well as the future needs of the food industry.
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As you will have understood, wholesale markets are essential infrastructures that allow the meeting of supply and demand for food to flow smoothly and thus secure the supply of cities. Although their usefulness is not questioned, they are nevertheless faced with different issues specific to the country in which they are located. In France, the aim is to support the evolution of existing markets in order to adapt to new consumption habits and changes in food systems), while internationally the challenges are focused on structuring food chains and the difficulties of designing and transferring previously informal activities.
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