Mercadona Lowers Hacendado Semi-Skimmed Milk to €0.83
Mercadona’s Hacendado semi-skimmed milk fell to €0.83 per litre in October, down from €0.88 at the start of 2026. The price had already been reduced to €0.84 in April. The skimmed variety declined from €0.84 to €0.81 per litre over the same period, while whole milk moved from €0.97 to €0.96.
The semi-skimmed product has therefore decreased by about 5.7% since January. Price checks published this week confirmed the €0.83 level. The Coordinadora de Organizaciones de Agricultores y Ganaderos (COAG) urged Mercadona not to join what it described as a new “price war” among retailers.
COAG said its concern was not that consumers were paying less, but how the reduction would be distributed along the supply chain. “Making milk cheaper cannot come out of the farmer’s pocket,” the organisation said. Isabel Vilalba, who is responsible for the dairy sector on COAG’s executive committee, said a reduction that was not shared evenly could leave producers absorbing the loss of margin.
There is no evidence in the published information that Mercadona has reduced the price paid to its suppliers because of the retail cut. No contracts were provided establishing a direct link between the two movements. Mercadona says that all milk sold under the Hacendado brand is Spanish and comes from more than 3,000 farmers.
The debate comes as Spain’s raw-milk price is below its level a year earlier. The national average was €0.469 per litre in August, compared with €0.519 in August 2025, a fall of about 9.7%. Deliveries reached 624,947 tonnes that month, 3.3% more than a year earlier. From January to August, production totalled 5.095m tonnes, up 1.7%.
Spain had 8,425 cow-milk producers making deliveries in August, 498 fewer than a year earlier and 63 fewer than in July. COAG said the country had about 17,000 farms in April 2015, indicating a substantial reduction in the number of producers over roughly a decade while overall output continued to rise.
Retail pricing is subject to Spain’s Food Chain Law, which requires a contract price paid to a primary producer to exceed that producer’s effective production costs. The costs covered by the legislation include feed, fuel, energy, machinery, repairs, veterinary services, depreciation and labour. The law does not itself prohibit a lower shelf price, but it restricts passing commercial risks back through the chain in a way that leaves producers below their effective costs.
Royal Decree 95/2019 requires raw-milk supply contracts to be signed before delivery. Their prices may be fixed, variable or mixed; variable formulas must use objective indicators and take account of relevant costs such as feed, energy and fuel. Luis Pérez, COAG’s dairy-cattle representative, said the organisation had spent years trying to prevent milk from being used as a loss-leader product. COAG said the current reduction was not, by itself, proof of a loss-making sale or an unlawful practice.
