Towards the abolition of the 1 March deadline in annual negotiations?
Published on 22nd May 2026
Introduced in 2005, French regulations have stipulated that single agreements concluded between suppliers and distributors must be signed by 1 March of each year at the latest. This due date, commonly referred to as the “March deadline”, sets the pace for the entire annual commercial negotiation calendar. It requires the parties to formalise, before this date, the terms of sale, commercial cooperation commitments and all the obligations that will govern their relationship for the coming year.
In recent years, various factors have called into question the continuation of this March deadline.
Since 2016, French retailers have accelerated the organisation of part of their purchasing through European alliances based outside France, raising further issues regarding the application of the Egalim laws, particularly with regard to the applicable law and the powers conferred on the French regulator when products are marketed in France.
The Egalim laws, the first of which dates from 2018, have strengthened the framework for commercial negotiations with the aim of better protecting farmers’ incomes and have made annual negotiations more tense.
The periods of inflation between 2022 and 2025 also led the authorities to encourage renegotiations during the year, although these were difficult to reconcile with the logic of negotiations being finalised by 1 March.
At the same time, the regulator has stepped up checks on retailers’ compliance with the March deadline and, at the start of 2026, imposed a total of €45 million in administrative fines for failure to meet this obligation: €33.5 million in February 2026 against Eurelec Trading, the European headquarters of the Leclerc Group based in Belgium (which had already been fined €38 million in 2024 for the same practices and €6.34 million in 2020 for failing to comply with the formal requirements of the single agreement); €5.4 million against Aura Retail (the French alliance of Intermarché, Auchan and Casino) in March 2026; and €6.1 million in April 2026 against Eureca Mayoristas, the Carrefour Group’s international purchasing organisation based in Spain.
The issue of the March deadline is also at the heart of current parliamentary debate, as the French Senate inquiry into the profit margins of manufacturers and large retailers, launched in December 2025, has seen this topic come up repeatedly during several hearings.
Finally, statements attributed to the French Minister for Trade during his visit to the French International Agricultural Show in February 2026 raised the possibility of scrapping the March deadline for commercial negotiations.
Behind what might appear to be a simple matter of timing lies a fundamental debate: is the March deadline still a suitable tool for largely internationalised negotiations, or has it become a rigid constraint?
Firstly, it must be acknowledged that the March deadline suffers from a structural limitation. It concentrates a considerable volume of simultaneous negotiations into a three-month window, from 1 December to 1 March, generating organisational overload that operators describe as deadlines that are impossible to meet and discussions that stall for weeks before gathering pace in the final days. Paradoxically, it can backfire on the very objective it is intended to serve: as the March deadline approaches, it becomes a race against time where the risk of yielding to unfavourable terms grows with the urgency.
Furthermore, several distributors also argue that a delay in signing may be attributable to the manufacturer’s own behaviour and that it is paradoxical that only the distributor is subject to penalties. When questioned by the French Senate inquiry committee, Dominique Schelcher, president of Coopérative U, openly criticised the system, describing the current arrangement as “outdated” and advocating multi-year contracts with differentiated deadlines. Appearing before the same committee, Yannick Dalon, director of purchasing and merchandise at Casino, described the March deadline as a “key source of annual tension” and argued for its abolition in favour of multi-year contracts with renegotiation clauses.
More broadly, the March deadline is a French peculiarity with no equivalent among our European neighbours: in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands or the Nordic countries, negotiations are spread out over a longer period, with more frequent reviews. This French peculiarity is all the more problematic given that the DGCCRF considers that, as soon as products are intended for the French market, national rules apply, regardless of the power plant’s location or the contract law chosen by the parties.
On the other hand, the March deadline primarily serves to provide legal certainty: by requiring the signing of an agreement on a specific date, it transforms what can be lengthy discussions into a dated, enforceable and verifiable contractual commitment. For a supplier, not knowing by 1 March whether their agreement has been signed poses a direct risk to their financial year. Without this deadline, negotiations could drag on indefinitely, leaving suppliers – particularly SMEs and mid-sized companies – in a state of uncertainty that is detrimental to their business.
It also provides a basis for the regulator’s inspections, which verify annually that this March deadline is met and that the agreements comply with legal requirements. Without a fixed date, these inspections would lose much of their effectiveness. This March deadline requires overall consistency within the single agreement, with clauses relating to price, commercial cooperation and other obligations coming into force simultaneously.
The information report on the monitoring of the Egalim laws of 20 November 2024 considers that the principle of an annual deadline for the conclusion of agreements between manufacturers and distributors should not be called into question and recommends shorter negotiations, concluding on 1 February.
For Ania and Ilec, the suggestion that the scheme might be called into question is “a cause for serious concern”. Both organisations believe that calling into question the 1 March deadline would undermine the entire framework established by the Egalim laws: “the deadline currently enables the DGCCRF to monitor commercial negotiations in terms of both substance and form”. It was also emphasised that removing this March deadline would pose a significant risk of sustained pressure on suppliers throughout the year.
The March deadline thus reflects the government’s desire to protect suppliers from the risk of negotiations stalling, by guaranteeing them a fixed deadline beyond which commercial terms must be formalised.
To date, no reform has yet been finalised. The silence of the emergency bill on agricultural protection and sovereignty on this point, even though the issue is at the heart of current events in the sectors, is itself indicative of a political difficulty in reaching a decision.
It should be noted that Recommendation No. 16 of the French Senate inquiry committee’s report on the margins of manufacturers and large retailers, published on 21 May 2026, proposes to “set 15 January as the deadline for the signing of contracts, exclusively for SME suppliers to retailers”.
The question of maintaining the 1 March thus now goes beyond a mere scheduling issue. It is one of the indicators of the current tensions between the regulatory framework for commercial negotiations and the search for greater flexibility to account for ongoing economic fluctuations.
