Contracts
A contract is an agreement between two or more parties to establish, govern or terminate an economic legal relationship between them. In the case of food products it is a contract of sale defined as follows by the Italian Civil Code:
“The sale and the contract involving the transfer of the ownership of another thing or the transfer of another right for the consideration of a price”.
The contracts designed and disseminated by the Granaria of Milan are a tool to serve not the intentions of the individual parties, but of the market as a whole as well.
In fact, having common, shared and balanced rules, stemming from the juxtaposition of conflicting interests, allows for faster negotiations and makes it easier to perform one’s duties and obtain respect of one’s rights: in essence, a more fluid, and therefore less costly, market with benefits that reach up to the final consumer.
With expanding markets, it became necessary to standardize the conditions of performance and to specify the basic characteristics for each product under which the trade between seller and buyer takes place.
This effort, which started with the foundation of the Granaria and has continued over time, gave rise to unified national contracts, composed of two parts:
- the unified general conditions, which establish equal and valid rules for the performance of the trade for the most important products sold and purchased in Italy;
- the standard contract, which defines the basic characteristics of the traded product and, where necessary, specific executive conditions given a certain peculiarity of the good
These are rules that the players, Purchaser and Seller, freely accept: there is no obligation to use the Granaria contracts, only operational convenience. That they have become the reference contracts in many cases is because they were and are suited to facilitate the agreement between the parties.