Americans have probably never heard of Carrefour. The company, headquartered just outside Paris, opened its first grocery store in 1963. Today, the company operates more than 12,000 stores in more than 30 countries, boasts nearly 400,000 employees, and generates more than €100 billion in annual sales. As of last year, according to the Financial Times, it was “the world’s second-largest retailer in terms of revenues.”
Despite top-flight revenues, critics, including some key players inside the company itself, have long painted Carrefour as stodgy and stuck in its ways. But the company made perhaps its biggest impact recently by openly flouting a set of ridiculous EU regulations that caused millions of farm seed varieties to be banned. These longstanding and mind-numbingly stupid EU seed rules were as awful as they sound.
Carrefour challenged the rules in an effort “to provide its patrons with more options while supporting agricultural diversity.” The company did so through a campaign dubbed invariably “Forbidden Market” or “Black Supermarket,” which saw the hyperstore selling “illegal cereals, fruits and vegetables” from forbidden seeds in an effort to mock and overturn the rules.
This wasn’t a risk-free protest, writes Baylen Linnekin. Carrefour risked steep fines with its black-market tactics. Put in American terms, the company’s actions might be the equivalent of Walmart protesting dumb laws by selling raw milk in all its stores or giving away untaxed grocery bags in stores forced under the law to collect bag taxes.
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