São Paulo – Agrogen, a producer of chicken and genetic material for the area, headquartered in Rio Grande do Sul, has a slaughterhouse turned to supplying the Middle East. The company supplies meats to eight countries in the region, which answer to around 75% of company revenues with chicken exports, according to the international business analyst at Agrogen, José Francisco Mombach Friedrich. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and Iraq are Arab countries that receive products under the Nat Foods brand.
Agrogen has two chicken slaughterhouses, one in Itapejara do Oeste, in Paraná, and another in Sete Lagoas, in Minas Gerais. The former works practically solely for the Middle East. “We identified what is culturally important for them, the standards of cuts, we are highly focussed on them,” stated Friedrich. Halal slaughter takes place at the slaughterhouse, following Islamic regulations and required by most countries in the region. According to the analyst, exports to the Middle East are mainly grillers, or whole chickens.
Friedrich believes in greater sales in the region. “I am sure that these relations will grow much,” he said. The company usually promotes trade trips to the Middle East during the year to meet and come closer to clients. One is during the Gulfood, a fair in the food sector that takes place early into the year, in Dubai, in the Emirates, in which Agrogen participates as an exhibitor.
Agrogen exports chicken to around 40 countries. But international sales began in Saudi Arabia, two years ago, as soon as the company started slaughtering chickens. “We started exporting to the most demanding countries worldwide, beginning with Saudi Arabia,” he said, recalling that apart from halal, the country calls for the chicken being fed with 100% vegetable food. Currently the foreign market answers to 65% of Agrogen sales.
The company entered the chicken slaughter area with high-level know how in the area, as it belongs to the former owners of Frangosul, sold in the 1990s to the French Doux. Agrogen belonged to Frangosul, but was not included in the deal and continued being run by the same owners, in the area of genetic material for meat chickens. It soon established a partnership with the North American Cobb, considered one of the best companies in the world in the area of poultry genetics, and produces, from Cobb hens, the matrices that lay the eggs for the meat chickens.
For the work with the hens, Agrogen has three units in Rio Grande do Sul, in São José do Sul, Triunfo and São Francisco de Paula, and another in Paraná, in Guarapuava. At the headquarters, in Montenegro, the group has its management offices, a laboratory and an incubator. According to Friedrich, 13.3 million hens are produced a year. The hen production business itself, however, is turned to the domestic market, due to the partnership with Cobb.
Agrogen works with integrated production, in which it delivers a chick to the producer. The chick is raised by the farmer and is then returned to the company at the time of slaughter. The Agrogen chicken brand, Nat Foods, entered the market in 2010. In the beginning, the company did not have its own slaughterhouse, but it hired out one shift at a unit, where it worked with its own quality control and employees. In a year and a half, however, the company was already running the unit in Minas Gerais and little later the one in Paraná.
The current president at the company is Flávio Sérgio Wallauer, who was also ahead of Frangosul before the sale to Doux. The company has already won several quality, technology and trade operation awards, one of the latest being Valor 1000, from newspaper Valor Econômico, for most efficient management in the country in the agricultural sector. Agrogen has over 2,000 employees.
Contact
Agrogen site: www.agrogen.com.br
Nat Foods site: www.natfoods.com.br
Telephone: (+55 51) 3883-2100
E-mail: josefriedrich@agrogen.com.br
*Translated by Mark Ament
