Insee Première · October 2026 · n° 2131

Sharp rises in prices between 2020 and 2024 boosted the return on assets of agri-food wholesalers

Agri-food wholesalers are major players in the distribution of these products and recorded a trade margin of 49 billion euros in 2025. Between 2020 and 2024, wholesale agri-food prices rose sharply, in the wake of rising global prices for agricultural commodities and energy, driven in particular by the post-Covid economic recovery and the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

During this period, sales increased sharply in value terms, but in volume terms they fell for wholesalers of raw agricultural products (-7.2%) and remained virtually unchanged for food wholesalers (-0.1%). By contrast, sales volumes in wholesale trade as a whole increased over the same period (+5.4%).

Between 2020 and 2024, the trade margin of the agri-food wholesale trade rose sharply in value terms for raw agricultural products (+16.9%) and even more so for food products (+31.8%), as it did for the wholesale trade sector as a whole (+30.4%). The trade margin rate for wholesalers of agricultural and food products, however, declined slightly between 2020 and 2024, reflecting an increase in the cost of goods purchased even sharper than that of the trade margin.

The trade margins increased more than intermediate consumption and labour costs, allowing a sharp rise of 45% in the gross operating surplus of the agri-food wholesale sector over four years. As a result, the margin rate increased by almost 4 percentage points to 35.8%, while return on assets also rose over the period (+1.6 percentage points to 10.7%).