Small food shops: the metropolis of Toulouse rather well off
These results are confirmed by the call for testimonials launched by Mediacités as part of our major survey on food. “I was already consuming in the local bulk and organic grocery store, [la crise sanitaire] has only reinforced this habit ”, indicates a reader from Toulouse. “I try to stock up as much as possible in small shops rather than in the supermarket (for which I have never had a great attraction)”, confides another inhabitant of the agglomeration.
36 additional butchers in the Toulouse metropolis
But it is still necessary to be able to do it. Because in this area, all French people are not in the same boat. As the geographer Jean Soumagne noted in 2002, in France “25 to 30% of small food businesses disappeared from rural areas during the 1980s and 1990s”. The movement has continued since. In April 2019, in a data survey from the Insee Permanent Equipment Base (BPE), Le Figaro highlighted a drop in the number of French municipalities with a butcher’s shop (-3.1%) or a bakery (-0.9%) between 2012 and 2017.
To find out what is the situation of small food shops in the Toulouse metropolis, Mediacités dived into the same database, but for the years 2015 to 2020. The result of this research is rather reassuring. In Toulouse and its metropolis, all the lights are green: over the past five years, the number of grocery stores, bakeries, butchers and even fishmongers has climbed. And sometimes widely.
In 2020, there are 36 more butcher’s and delicatessens on the account than in 2015 in the Toulouse metropolitan area, an increase of more than 15%, well above the average for other French metropolises (6.5%). The number of grocery stores is also skyrocketing, up nearly 35%. And the same is true of all other food businesses, in proportions that are still lower than the growth recorded in all the major French cities. In Toulouse and its surroundings, the number of fishmongers only increased by 4.8% against 9.9% on average in other metropolises.
Six towns without a bakery in the metropolis of Toulouse
As can be seen on the map below, the inhabitants of the Toulouse metropolis are nevertheless rather preferred. You can find everything there and in quite a large number. A bakery for 1,800 inhabitants, for example, or a butcher’s shop for 2,849 inhabitants, much better than in Bordeaux, Nantes, Strasbourg or even Lille. And fourth place in the ranking of the 15 largest French metropolises
If the INSEE BPE database unfortunately does not provide details of the number of shops at the scale of each of the metropolitan municipalities, it indicates whether they have seen one of these types of shops set up. or disappear within the last five years. By consulting the interactive map below, we can see that if Aucamville, north of Toulouse, has lost its fish market, four other towns in the metropolis have seen one open its doors during the same period (Cugnaux, Colomiers, Cornebarrieu and Saint-Orens de Gameville).
An indicator that highlights the unequal distribution of this equipment at the metropolitan scale and the old principle of commercial concentration: of the 36 additional butcher shops in the metropolis since 2015, all have opened in municipalities that already had them. Result: the inhabitants of 10 municipalities are still forced to go to a neighboring town to buy meat. To the east of Toulouse, around Mons and Flourens, six others still do not have a bakery, while only twelve, a little less than a third, are lucky enough to have a fishmonger on their territory. Around Toulouse, those who love fish continue to take their cars to buy them for a long time.
The data used in this article are taken from the permanent database of INSEE equipment. The latter lists the equipment installed in a territory, from the courts to the post office, including bakeries and gymnasiums. Since 2018, INSEE has been able to monitor changes in the number of equipment over a period of five years. It then gives access to the number of equipment, by type and by urban unit. However, the precise number per municipality is not published, for reasons of anonymity. Only the presence or not of at least one type of equipment in the municipality is indicated.