“ A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans, new analysis reveals.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/...
Still, I do agree with you that there are some areas where a single company controls the vast majority of the market, and furthermore it got there by buying up a lot of brands, and this looks like there would be some pretty straightforward antitrust cases here. E.g. Grupo Bimbo alone controls nearly 2/3 of the bagel market, Danone controls nearly 80% of the refrigerated soy milk market, PepsiCo controls 87.5% of the dip market. Furthermore, I think the article does a great job exposing "the illusion of choice", i.e. in dips PepsiCo owns Tostitos, Lays, Fritos, and Doritos brands.
E.g. in Canada, Costco toilet paper was produced/supplied by a different company between east and west coast.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...
So I would argue that other countries, if they want to tame inflation, should allow their smaller inefficient producers to get squeezed.
If total consumer spending in the US is 50k and in Italy 20k, then it seems rather obvious to me that Americans are gonna spend a smaller fraction of that on food...
If you run the numbers, those two countries spend, in fact, almost the same dollar amount on food (3.2k vs 3.5k).