São Paulo – Sixteen importers of cashew nuts, Brazil nuts and peanuts will be in the city of São Paulo this week for business meetings with Brazilian suppliers of the products. They are coming from two Arab countries, the UAE and Qatar, and also Russia, Colombia, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and United Kingdom.
The initiative is from the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex-Brasil) and will put importers in touch with representatives of 11 Brazilian companies, between producers and traders from the sector. Two buyers from the United Arab Emirates will come to take part in the meetings. Another company will arrive from Qatar.
Gyma Food Industries, one of the main distributors and food producers of the UAE, will take part in the meetings, according to Karen Fernandes Jones, chief executive officer of the Apex-Brasil office for Middle East and North Africa. Gyma holds the brand Bayara, the region’s market leader in dry fruits, nuts and spices.
This is the project’s second edition. In April of last year, Apex-Brasil organized a similar meeting, which generated USD 3.5 million in exports, between the deals signed during the event and the ones signed in the following 12 months. According to Jones, afterwards, the volume of sales surpassed the forecast made at the time.
The nuts project was planned by the Apex-Brasil office for the Middle East and North Africa last year. The idea rose from a study within the National Plan for Exports (PNE), in which cashew nuts appears as the product recommended for market opening in Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and Brazil nuts appears as the item recommended to regain market share in the United Arab Emirates.
When the project was announced, other offices of Apex-Brasil abroad showed interest in taking part and sending importers. The initiative was then expanded to other countries besides the Arabs. The project’s leadership and organization is held by the Apex-Brasil office in Dubai, but there are other partners, such as the agency’s Business Promotion Coordination and the offices in Brussels, Moscow and Bogotá.
Jones says they are bringing to Brazil companies that are interested in the three products: cashew nuts, Brazil nuts and peanuts. She explains that Brazil had the best harvest of peanuts of the last few years, but that the other two products hadn’t produced results as good. Brazilian production of peanuts is concentrated mainly in Brazil’s Southeast, with Brazil nuts in the North and cashew nuts in the Northeast.
The Middle East and North Africa market is considered promising for these products. “The consumption of nuts is part of the culture, you notice that in all of the region’s countries,” says Jones. The products are used, for instance, in traditional local desserts. According to the chief executive, there’s an especially large demand in the United Arab Emirates, which consumes but also re-exports the products to other countries.
However, Brazil supplies less than 1% of the UAE’s imports, according to Sabrina Cenni, the business analyst of the Apex-Brasil office for the Middle East and North Africa.
Jones believes that the contact between importers and producers, such as the one scheduled for next week, is the best platform for the approach by the sector with the global market. But she says that Brazil needs to solve some problems it faces in production, such as the costs of processing and logistics and the volumes. “The Brazilian production capacity has to improve,” she says.
The importers’ schedule in the city of São Paulo begins with business matchmaking meetings on April 26 and 27 in a hotel. The next day, the foreign companies will visit the São Paulo City market, the place where products such as nuts and peanuts are sold. The Brazilian business owners set to take part in the meetings were selected by Apex-Brasil.
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
