IN Brief:
- Ireland’s Agri-Food Regulator opened 25 investigations into suspected unfair trading practices during 2025.
- The regulator received 51 complaints and conducted six on site inspections during the year.
- Further information gathering powers are expected to increase scrutiny of pricing and commercial behaviour across food markets.
Ireland’s Agri-Food Regulator opened 25 investigations into suspected unfair trading practices during 2025, marking a substantial increase in enforcement across agricultural and food supply relationships.
During the year, the regulator received 51 complaints and conducted six on site inspections. The rise in activity indicates a move from establishing the regulatory framework towards closer examination of buyer behaviour, payments, contract changes, and supplier complaints.
Irish unfair trading rules prohibit practices including late payment, short notice cancellation of perishable orders, unilateral alteration of supply agreements, commercial retaliation, and demands that suppliers cover costs which properly belong to buyers.
The rules apply to qualifying transactions involving agricultural and food products, with protection determined partly by the relative turnover of supplier and buyer. Larger buyers also carry formal reporting duties and must appoint a suitably qualified liaison officer.
Businesses with annual turnover exceeding €50m must submit an annual compliance report by 31 March, covering the previous calendar year. Those reports require internal assurance that purchasing, finance, technical, and commercial practices comply with the regulations in daily operation rather than only in written policy.
The regulator’s enforcement work has already progressed into prosecution. Asba Meats pleaded guilty in June 2026 to 79 offences involving non payment for cattle and sheep supplied by 12 farmers, with the unpaid amount exceeding €554,000.
Contracts meet factory disruption
Food manufacturing creates conditions in which commercial decisions can transfer substantial cost within a few hours. When an order for a perishable product is cancelled, the supplier may already have purchased raw materials, scheduled labour, printed packaging, completed production, and booked transport.
Milk, meat, produce, bakery goods, and chilled prepared foods cannot always be redirected to another customer. Recipes, pack sizes, labels, shelf life, and customer specifications may make the finished stock unsuitable for alternative outlets.
Written contracts therefore need clear provisions covering price, forecast status, committed volume, payment timing, rejection, quality disputes, promotions, deductions, and unavoidable waste. The value of those provisions depends on whether operational teams follow them when forecasts change or a production problem develops.
Procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and finance systems often record different parts of the same transaction. An investigation may require a business to reconstruct purchase orders, delivery records, quality reports, invoice deductions, emails, contract versions, and the authority behind a cancellation or price change.
Efforts to address avoidable waste through updated food supply contract clauses have similarly placed forecasting, communication, and surplus handling within the commercial agreement rather than treating waste as an issue discovered after production.
Supplier dependence complicates enforcement because a smaller business may rely heavily on one customer. A formal complaint can protect legal rights while creating concern over future listings, volume allocation, or contract renewal, which makes confidential reporting and evidence led inspections particularly significant.
Additional data powers
Further powers expected by the end of 2026 would enable the regulator to require businesses to provide price and market information. Access to transaction data could expose repeated payment delays, unusual deductions, or margin movements that are difficult to detect through individual complaints alone.
Stronger information powers will also increase the standard expected of business records. Contract terms, rebate structures, promotional funding, supplier payments, and retrospective adjustments will need to reconcile across internal systems and remain available for examination.
The regulator’s second supplier survey showed generally high levels of satisfaction, although one in nine respondents reported experiencing an unfair trading practice. Late payment, short notice cancellation, and demands that suppliers cover loss or deterioration remained among the concerns identified.
Commercial pressure is unlikely to decline as businesses manage volatile ingredients, energy, labour, and transport costs. Buyers will continue revising forecasts and challenging prices, while suppliers will seek firmer commitments to support investment and production planning.
Closer enforcement does not remove the need for those negotiations, but it narrows the range of costs that can be shifted through unilateral action. Businesses will need records showing that changes were agreed, justified, and implemented consistently with both contracts and statutory rules.
The increase to 25 investigations establishes unfair trading compliance as an active operating requirement. Payment systems, forecast controls, cancellation procedures, and dispute handling now sit within a regulatory environment that is gathering more evidence and testing more transactions.
