The Competition Authority imposes a penalty of 4 million euros on the Mariage Frères group.
It is one of the main producers of high-end teas in France which has been singled out by the Competition Authority. In a communicated of December 11, the authority announced that it would impose a sanction of 4 million euros to the Mariage Frères groupafter receiving the investigation report transmitted by the DGCCRF. He is accused of tea seller having “hindered for almost 15 years the commercial freedom of its distributors in their prohibiting the sale of its brand products online, and resell its products to other resellers. Mariage Frères has thus “deprived consumers of the opportunity to benefit from better prices resulting from competition between all distributors”. In addition, the ban on marketing its teas on the Internet has restricted the development of distributors’ activity.
Prohibited from using the Mariage Frères logo
In its conditions of sale, Mariage Frères reserved the exclusivity for the sale of its products remotely and on the Internet. If distributors were authorized to indicate on their website that they were selling the brand’s products in their store, they could not sell them on their website and could not use the brand logo either. Mariage Frères carefully monitored compliance with these rules by asking distributors who had offered its products for sale online to quickly remove them from their sites.
“We had to preserve the prestige of the brand”
Between 2013 and 2021, the share of sales made online by the Mariage Frères group (mainly via its site or via Amazon) has more than tripled. Opposite, distributors including small businesses were deprived of it: “I think that the online sale of Mariage Frères could generate minimum 30% increase in my turnover” testified one of them cited by the Competition Authority. To defend itself, Mariage Frères explained that it wanted to preserve the prestigious image of its products. “We could not control the way our products would be marketed, the quality of the website, and this was likely to damage the brand” argued the group’s financial director.