JBS versus the bakery on the corner – 09/08/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

For those coming from São Paulo, the Portão neighborhood is the first in the municipality of Atibaia, just after the border with Mairiporã. It’s just over an hour’s drive from Praça da Sé – it takes the kids longer to get from Santa Cecília to The Town festival.

The Portão neighborhood, however, is full of caipirice.

Its main street is lined with half a dozen shops selling farm goods: gardening and carving tools, fertilizers, chlorine for swimming pools, dog food. The street smells like dog food.

Furthermore, the high street of Portão is occupied by small shops, typical of the interior. Gordo’s cafeteria, Frigo Carnes butcher shop, Avenida pharmacy, Manhattan tobacconist and Magia stationery store.

Last Saturday, I entered the Big supermarket – an Atibai chain with tentacles in Bragança Paulista – and came across a rotating oven for roasting chicken, the popular dog television.

No big deal, if it weren’t for the fact that the oven sports a huge Seara sign, advertising a certain “bakery chicken”.

Seara is a brand of JBS, the largest meat processor in the world, with units in two dozen countries.

The corporate titan decided to compete with the corner bakery. He decided to compete with Bela Vista roasts, right there in Portão, a precarious operation installed in the garage of a residence.

It is frightening that a single company controls, without exaggeration, all stages of the production of a roast chicken. Starting with the chicken coop.

“On JBS’s own farms, the animals are fed exclusively with feed formulated by the company itself,” says the company’s website. JBS also owns the slaughter, processing, distribution and, finally, dog television.

Another JBS brand, Swift, has spread across Brazil in stores selling all possible freezable food: meat, fish, açaí, supposedly artisanal pizza, soup, rice, beans, ravioli, garlic bread, coxinha, as well as farofa, beer and beef jerky. .

Too practical. But let’s try to look at it from another perspective.

For small businesses, it is impossible to coexist with a company that controls the entire chain. The vertical operation, something viable only for big money, cuts costs and workforce.

In plain English, it means fewer jobs and prices that Madá’s emporium could never offer. Manuel’s bakery will close to make way for a Swift store. Chang’s minimarket will be reinvented as Oxxo. Kazuo’s pharmacy will become Droga Raia.

Are you giving a damn and focusing on social impact, as long as you can buy all the barbecue in the same place? So pay attention to your surroundings.

The neighborhoods are all the same. The cities are all identical. São Paulo, Atibaia, Brasília, Salvador, Fortaleza.

You fly 3000 km, arrive at a place you’ve never visited before and find the same anodyne and aseptic desert that you have next to home. And you can also give your CPF to take advantage of the loyalty card offers.

It’s much more than boring or boring. It is death in life.

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