Food retailing and prices in Slovenia

This paper focuses on agro- food chains and agro- food consumer prices in Slovenia considering its European Union (EU) membership. As the Slovenian agro- food markets were distorted prior to the EU accession with some agro- food prices that were greater than comparable EU prices, the empirical results confirm that with the EU membership Slovenian real agro- food consumer prices have largely downward adjusted. Besides policy changes, internalization of retailing and distribution chains by entries of supermarket s and hypermarket s have had impacts on market structures and rationalization of marketing activities. Supermarket s and hypermarket s are taking over a substantial proportion of retail trade in agro- food products with implications on increasing food chains efficiency by squeezing structures in consumer prices, including for farmers, processors and marketing margins for main agro- food staples. After the greater price adjustment changes that occurred by the EU membership, some stabilizations in agro- food markets are occurring, but at different levels of real consumer and producer prices and marketing margins. This imply that agro- food markets in the new EU member states are becoming much more integrated into internationally competitive markets, where pricing and sales promotion issues and branding are taking important role in market segmentation of agro- food products