EDIFACT in France — Grocery and retail

Roughly three billion EDIFACT messages exchanged every year between suppliers and French retailers. In 2026 EDIFACT is still the operational backbone of French retail, far ahead of PEPPOL and the Factur-X mandate.

Retailers and their EDI portals

Every French grocery retailer operates an EDI portal, either in-house or delegated to a certified operator. The table below lists the official entry points as of Q2 2026 (source: GS1 France partner sheets and retailers' documentation).

Each portal documents its business rules in a Manuel utilisateur EDI (MUE — EDI User Manual) covering internal coding, mandatory segments beyond the standard subset, send frequency, processing windows, test and qualification process. No production flow starts before the retailer has validated the MUE.

GS1 EANCOM 2002 subset and national profiles

EANCOM (EAN Communication) is the EDIFACT subset built for retail, maintained by GS1. The reference edition in French grocery is EANCOM 2002 S4, published in 2008-2009 against the EDIFACT D.01B directories, and still dominant in 2026. A handful of advanced suppliers deploy EANCOM 2002 S5 (D.07A) for enriched traceability and EPC tag data.

Main EANCOM subset profiles:

• S2002 — minimal historical set, still used by some manufacturers for export outside Europe.
• S3 — intermediate subset, equivalent to Carrefour's pre-2010 baseline, still seen in SME flows.
• S4 — today's mainstream subset, adds DESADV with SSCC, detailed-VAT INVOIC, positive/negative RECADV, INVRPT for stock counts.
• S5 — GS1 EPCIS extensions, mandatory lot/serial traceability, used in pharma (and increasingly visible in premium retail references).

Day-to-day messages

SLSRPT and INVRPT underpin VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory) and CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment) collaborations, which French retailers run mostly on fast-moving categories (HBA, ultra-fresh).

Anatomy of a Carrefour ORDERS

A simplified excerpt of a typical Carrefour purchase order to a national supplier, in EANCOM 2002 S4 against directory D.01B:

UNB+UNOC:3+3010101000007:14+3245678901234:14+260518:0930+CRF000142'
UNH+1+ORDERS:D:01B:UN:EAN010'
BGM+220+CRF-91-2026-000142+9'
DTM+137:20260518:102'
DTM+2:20260520:102'
RFF+CT:CTR-2024-CRF-987'
NAD+BY+3010101000007::9'
NAD+SU+3245678901234::9'
NAD+DP+3010101072345::9'
LIN+1++3220420001234:EN'
QTY+21:144'
PRI+AAA:1.49'
LIN+2++3220420005678:EN'
QTY+21:72'
PRI+AAA:2.30'
UNS+S'
CNT+2:2'
UNT+15+1'
UNZ+1+CRF000142'

Reading keys:

• UNB — Carrefour France HQ GLN (3010101000007) to supplier GLN (3245678901234), qualifier 14 = EAN/GS1 code.
• BGM+220 — firm purchase order, Carrefour number CRF-91-2026-000142.
• DTM+137 = order date; DTM+2 = requested delivery date.
• RFF+CT — annual frame contract reference (Carrefour Annuel).
• NAD+BY buyer, NAD+SU supplier, NAD+DP delivery point (Carrefour DC 91 in this example).
• LIN+...:EN — article GTIN-13 (qualifier EN = EAN article).
• QTY+21 = ordered quantity; PRI+AAA = net unit price (annually negotiated).

DESADV, SSCC and GS1-128 palletisation

DESADV is the logistic pivot of French retail. It accompanies the physical delivery and carries pallet identification through the SSCC (Serial Shipping Container Code, 18 digits, GS1-128 AI 00). Without a valid SSCC, goods are rejected at the door of Carrefour, Auchan and Système U warehouses.

UNB+UNOC:3+3245678901234:14+3010101000007:14+260520:1430+DES000089'
UNH+1+DESADV:D:01B:UN:EAN005'
BGM+351+DES-2026-000089+9'
DTM+137:20260520:102'
DTM+11:20260520:102'
RFF+ON:CRF-91-2026-000142'
NAD+SU+3245678901234::9'
NAD+BY+3010101000007::9'
NAD+DP+3010101072345::9'
CPS+1'
PAC+12'
PCI+33E+003245678900000234:SSCC'
LIN+1++3220420001234:EN'
QTY+12:144'
LIN+2++3220420005678:EN'
QTY+12:72'
UNS+S'
CNT+2:2'
UNT+15+1'
UNZ+1+DES000089'

The PCI+33E segment carries the pallet's SSCC, while CPS (Consignment Packing Sequence) carries its packaging hierarchy. Retailers expect the SSCC printed on the GS1-128 label to match exactly the SSCC announced in DESADV — otherwise the scan is rejected.

Networks and EDI providers

Routing in French retail EDIFACT relies on two coexisting models that have run side by side for 30 years:

• Legacy VANs: OpenText/GXS (formerly Sterling), TrueCommerce, IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, Edicom, B-Process (now Tradeshift / Coupa).
• Modern SaaS EDI providers: Generix Collaborative Network, Tradeshift, Tungsten, Comarch ECOD, EDITEL Group, ESKER Document Process, Sage Network. Newer suppliers prefer them for the monitoring and the web portal.

Dominant transport protocols in French retail: AS2 (RFC 4130, used by Carrefour, Auchan, Casino), SFTP (still very common for Leclerc and Intermarché), HTTPS REST APIs (rising with discounters), and a residual X.400 footprint on a few historical flows.

Volumes and EDIFACT market share

The 2024 estimate published in the Generix white paper "Supply chain digitale France" lands at roughly 3 billion EDIFACT messages per year between suppliers and French retailers, broken down as:

• ~1.2 billion ORDERS (orders and replenishment)
• ~0.9 billion DESADV (despatch advices)
• ~0.5 billion INVOIC (invoices)
• ~0.2 billion RECADV, INVRPT, SLSRPT, PRICAT combined
• ~0.2 billion CONTRL and APERAK (technical acknowledgements)

For comparison, PEPPOL UBL flows in France amounted in 2024 to a few tens of millions of invoices (mostly B2G via Chorus Pro), under 5% of retail EDI volume. EDIFACT remains by far the dominant retail backbone.

Coexistence with PEPPOL and Factur-X

The 2026 mandate requires B2B invoices to flow through a PDP (Plateforme de Dématérialisation Partenaire) or the PPF in a format compliant with EN 16931 (UBL, CII or Factur-X). EDIFACT INVOIC is not part of the accepted set.

In practice retailers and suppliers take three positions:

1. PDP-side conversion — the manufacturer keeps sending EDIFACT INVOIC to its EDI operator, which converts to compliant UBL/CII and routes to the customer's PDP through PEPPOL. The dominant 2026 scenario.
2. Dual stream — INVOIC in EDIFACT for retailer ERP reconciliation, plus UBL via PEPPOL for tax compliance. Heavy but secures both use cases.
3. Native UBL switch — a few flagship industrials (Danone, Nestlé France, L'Oréal) switch their outbound invoicing to native UBL and drop INVOIC for billing while keeping EDIFACT for operational ORDERS/DESADV.

ECR France pushes convergence and published in 2024 a PEPPOL Retail Guide aligning business codes (BT-XX of the PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0) on existing EANCOM practices. The transition spans several years; operational EDIFACT (ORDERS, DESADV) will remain dominant well beyond 2026.

Sources

• GS1 France — EANCOM 2002 — official subset portal.
• ECR France — retail good practices (Annuel EDI, DESADV recommendations).
• FCD — Fédération du Commerce et de la Distribution .
• Generix — Supply chain digitale France 2024 white paper (volume estimates).
• GS1 France — Logistic label GS1-128 and SSCC .

Further reading

• France — e-invoicing mandate 2026 / 2027
• GS1 France + ECR France — standards and practices
• French VAT regimes and e-invoicing
• EDIFACT — standard reference
• PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0
• AS2 — application transport
• Tool — EDIFACT validator
• Tool — PEPPOL validator