Carrefour Just Joined Shufersal and Rami Levy in Wholesale. Their New Customers Sit Below the Radar of Every Price Index in Israel — Ours Included

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-08-05 · 5 min read

16 points — The gap on Superclear's own price index between Rami Levy (14% below the national median) and Carrefour (2% above it) — two chains at opposite ends of the consumer price ranking that this week, with Carrefour's move, ended up on the exact same strategy: becoming the wholesale supplier to thousands of grocers and kiosks too small to ever be required to publish a price. Superclear data, 2026-08-05

On August 4, 2026, Calcalist reported that Global Retail, which operates the Carrefour franchise in Israel, had signed a deal to acquire 70% of Peri Market — a distributor of food, toiletries and cleaning products to minimarkets, corner grocers and small businesses — at a valuation of ₪19 million. The remaining shareholders: the Adom Group (45%) and "Elad & Ananuno" (5%), plus Nachum Bitan, who currently holds 50% of Peri Market while also owning 22% of Global Retail itself — the company now buying his.

For Calcalist, this wasn't just news of one deal. The story's own headline was "Carrefour, following Shufersal and Rami Levy" — and that's the real point. The three biggest chains on Superclear's own price index are each building, in their own way, a wholesale arm that sells directly to the neighborhood grocer, the kiosk, the village store in a moshav or kibbutz, the nursing home, the office cafeteria. And that is exactly where the ability of any price index in Israel — ours included — to see what's happening runs out.

Who got there first

Shufersal was first. Per Calcalist, the chain opened its first Cash & Carry branches back in 2018, then acquired the Amiga food distributor and a second distributor in northern Israel in 2022. Globes reported in March 2025 that the business actually predates that, going back to 2017, and that brothers Yossi and Shlomi Amir — who had bought into Shufersal about a year earlier — rebranded it as "HaMafitz" ("The Distributor"), with roughly 5,000-square-meter branches in Kiryat Bialik, Be'er Ya'akov and Haifa, and plans to expand to Be'er Sheva. Industry estimates cited by Calcalist put HaMafitz's annual turnover at around ₪1.5 billion.

Rami Levy entered the space in 2022, opening its first Cash & Carry store in Haifa under the "Rami Levy for Businesses" brand, at a cost of ₪15 million out of a planned ₪90 million total investment. At the time, Levy projected the business would reach roughly ₪1 billion in revenue within three years — leveraging the chain's own roughly ₪6 billion annual buying power to undercut what small grocers were paying their direct suppliers.

Now Carrefour is joining, not by building from scratch but by buying in: Peri Market arrives with a working 7,000-square-meter logistics center in the Kafr Qasem industrial zone, a truck and forklift fleet, and an active distribution network already in place. Per Calcalist, the acquisition gives Carrefour "immediate market penetration" into wholesale, including the ability to expand sales to grocery stores in kibbutzim and moshavim, nursing homes, offices and cafeterias.

Three chains at opposite ends of our index — converging on the same plan

This is where we can add a number nobody else has. These three chains sit in very different places on Superclear's own price index. As of August 5, 2026: Rami Levy ranks 30th of 33 chains — 14% below the national median, labeled "very cheap." Shufersal ranks 11th — 1% above the median, "average." Carrefour, still listed in our database under its former name, "Yenot Bitan," ranks 10th — 2% above the median, also "average." A 16-percentage-point gap on a single index, between the cheapest of the three and the priciest — and yet all three have bet on the exact same business model: becoming the wholesale supplier to the smallest layer of Israeli grocery retail.

Their new customers will never show up in our data

Israel's Food Law, as we already found when Nizat Haduvdevan crossed the same line, defines a "large retailer" — one required to publish daily price files — as any operator with at least three stores and annual revenue above roughly ₪294.3 million (the 2026-indexed figure). A neighborhood grocer buying wholesale stock from HaMafitz, "Rami Levy for Businesses" or Peri Market is, almost by definition, light-years below that line. It publishes no price file not because it's breaking any rule, but because the law was never written to reach it.

The implication: as the supply chain for thousands of Israel's independent grocers, kiosks and minimarkets increasingly funnels through the same three chains that already dominate the transparency index, Superclear — like every other price-comparison tool in Israel — still can't see what happens at the other end of that supply chain. The opaque layer of the market isn't shrinking. It's simply moved one step inward, into the supply chains of the very giants that are visible.

Even the wholesale branches themselves haven't always followed the rules

There's a precedent here worth noting, because it shows how easily this corner gets cut. In December 2024, Israel's Consumer Protection and Fair Trade Authority announced its intent to fine Shufersal ₪2,125,167, alleging that three of its "HaMafitz" branches — in Kiryat Bialik, Be'er Ya'akov and Ashdod — failed to display full prices, failed to mark VAT as required, failed to show unit prices, and did not fully mark the country of origin on agricultural produce. The authority called it "serious violations of consumer protection law." Shufersal said it operates lawfully and saw no basis for the intended fine. That is still a notice of intent, not a final ruling — but it shows that even a chain already ranked on our own index struggles to keep full price transparency once it moves from the consumer shelf to the wholesale counter.

The bottom line

This isn't a story about a deal that will make your basket cheaper. Nothing in the Carrefour-Peri Market agreement promises a lower price at the corner grocer — and there's no way to know if one ever arrives, because we have no data on that grocer, and likely never will. The story here is how the concentration you already recognize from the shelf — three or four chains controlling most of Israel's food retail — is extending one layer deeper, into the supply chain of the country's smallest retailers. And once it's there, nobody — not the shopper, not a journalist, not an automated price index — has a way to check it.