The article states that at least in some cases the inferior food is _more expensive_.
From the article: Nobody has an appetite for inferior food – and the solution is, most of the time, “add more sugar”. If you add to this the fact that food is generally more expensive in Romania [...]
I can't imagine any executive saying that. That makes no sense. Why would they?
My best guess is that either people are unwilling (or unable) to pay the same price as their Austrian / Belgian / French counterparts for the same product, or the cost of selling the same product and doing business in EE is somehow higher (e.g. due to required kickbacks and high level political corruption) meaning these companies end up with less profits operating in these countries and end up taking a shortcut to maintain their profit margins.
Or they actually make more from operating in EE, ending up with higher margins just because they can. That's also a possibility.
What I usually see in Vienna is Milka at 0.99Eur price for 100g package. Slovak price tend to be bit higher at around 1.19Eur for 100g, with 0.99Eur used as promo price. I never actually bothered to compare ingredients.
Please consider that selling to end customers is selling to certains price points, regardless the costs to a large degree. Milka is sold as premium chocolate bar with given price point. There’s plenty of competition both cheaper and more expensive. This is all about marketing and until recently, people were not really sensitive to ingredients, so they went with whatever is cheapest to produce within some margins of customer satisfaction.
So, I think your last statement is what is considered around here to be true.
But as it happens, I know quite a wealthy family who got scammed for millions (through a corrupt notary) on a property deal in an EE country. It wasn't even a business dispute, just a scam.
When they took the matter to court, which should have been a clear "win" case, the judge(s) (even on appeal) ruled against them, so they had no way to recover their money. From that point of view, it is not unreasonable for me to assume corruption can (potentially) play a part of it. :)
Personal anecdote - I visit Austria almost weekly due to business matters and never bothered to buy anything there just because I would consider it of better quality. I always assigned any perceived differences to placebo. I argued that detergent itself, once found and tested, is cheap enough to produce and most of the cost is marketing, packaging, shipping and profit. So why on earth would anyone cheat on detergent content. At most, maybe parfumes would be different due to local preferences etc. But few weeks ago, producers of laundry detergents reacted to public outcry due to these differences with answer that in western europe, people tend to wash clothes on 30C, so they put there much more enzymes (or what) than in EE, where people tend to wash on 40C. Sure they do, when you need to add much more detergent to clean anything on 30C... So go, figure.
That's the kicker -- it isn't. Some stuff is more expensive.
E.g., Milka chocolate - 1 EUR in Germany is also 1 EUR in Bulgaria. But in Germany it's good and in Bulgaria, it's shit.
So, the question should be: How much higher are the profit margins in Eastern Europe?
Most local raw produce is better. The packaged stuff is worse.
I think no-one disputes that the food is lower quality. The question is how much of a discount this gets, and why stores haven't created more expensive better quality options.
I recall an item on Dutch news that seemed to state that Romanians wanted the same products as Austria at a lower price. This is unlikely to be accurate reporting, because that stance is obviously unreasonable. That is presuming the desired price differential isn't just reflective of the cost savings by potentially having lower payed employees.