The açaí story

The New Yorker has a nice article (subscription necessary) about the rise and “fall” (a fall is promised in the headline, but in reality it seems to have been a mere flattening out of the market) of the açaí berry. Though billed as a study of what is behind the trajectory of new foods when introduced to the US market, it also tells an interesting story about how this influenced the Brazilians that harvest the product in the Amazon.

My dad used to tell me, around the time that we first traveled around Brazil together (in 2005), that I should have been the one to introduce açaí to the US market. What he didn’t know was that it was already a good six years too late – surfer dude brothers called the Blacks had already gone from café to café in California and Florida looking for customers for the case of frozen acaí pulp they had imported, and the “superfruit” had already appeared on Oprah, effectively ending any possibility of being the first to bring it to the ordinary American. And in any case, it may have required more courage than I possess to take out a $15 thousand loan on an initial supply of a product no one in the US had heard of.

Although almost no one had heard of the açaí berry in the US by the late 1990s, its growth in Brazil had already been impressive. The fruit was originally consumed in its fresh (almost flavorless) form, as a sauce for fish or basically any other food (basically as Bahians eat manioc flour today) by river-dwellers, or ribeirinhos, in the rain forest regions of norther Brazil. It slowly began to spread in its frozen form to other regions, following the migration pattern of riberinhos looking for work in big Brazilian cities like Rio and São Paulo. In the 80s, the Gracie family (of jiu-jitsu fame, and from the Amazon region) introduced it as a source of energy for athletes, converting it to its currently popular ice-cream-like form, flavored with sugar, granola and bananas. By the time the Blacks arrived in the late 1990s, it was a sensation.

Once establishing a small market for açaí in the US by around 2003, the Blacks founded the company that would become the leading name in açaí during its recent craze in the US: Sambazon, an acronym for Sustainable Management for the Brazilian Amazon. The environmental focus derived from the fact that açaí harvesting poses an alternative to logging as a source of income for ribeirinhos (as well as the need to market the product, obviously). With fresh multi-million dollar loans, they purchased land in the Brazilian state of Amapá and built a factory in order to process the fruit, supplied directly by the local ribeirinhos with no middleman. It became partially a social project, guaranteeing fair trade prices for suppliers and donating a portion of sales back to the community. This in turn led to increasing purchasing power in the area, which helped the local population reduce their isolation now that they could afford motorboats and goods from the city. The part that interests me here is the “unforeseen effects”. The article states:

“The motorboats have brought First World staples like soda and potato chips to the jungle, partially displacing açaí. In northern cities, the fruit has become too expensive to be a staple food for the urban poor.”

In effect, the boom in açaí globally has led to the decline of açaí locally.

This is not to say that the project isn’t meritorious – it seems to be very much so. And it is not the first environmental project to use açaí to prevent deforestation. An article from the Brazilian magazine Superinteressante in 2002 describes Muaná Alimentos, which has won awards, a forest management certificate, and funding from biodiversity funds as a result of its practices in harvesting açaí and heart-of-palm. Which, if the article can be trusted (there are no figures to cite), succeeded in reducing deforestation.

Açaí producer associations have sprung up throughout northern Brazil, especially in the state of Pará, which is said to be responsible for 90% of açaí production (reaching 500 metric tons in 2009, of which half was exported). A paper the state-owned agricultural research company EMBRAPA in 2006 highlights the intense research and development being performed on açaí to ensure sustainable harvesting and produce high-quality crops year-round, investments that are surely spurring development not only among farmers, but those providing the research, infrastructure for irrigation, and more.

As far as income for ordinary people, an article from Diário do Pará in 2004 quotes the mayor of a small city as saying “Açaí is the economic redemption of our city”, which had fallen on hard times since the failure of sugar cane as a viable industry. The article goes on to describe the floods of small loans that have come in to support local production. With organization and the formation of a cooperative, prices for growers increased ten fold, taking açaí from a source of pocket change on the side to principal employment for five to six thousand people in a city of 54,000. And of course, sound environmental training is given to growers.

If there are any signs of the slowdown in international consumption growth affecting growers, I can't find it in the press. Articles from 2010 and 2011 show continued investment in improving supply chains and further stories of families making a good living off of the fruit. And indeed when the news is negative, it is generally due to consumer prices, which have remained high despite the economic difficulties that have slowed sales growth for Sambazon.

By most accounts, the fruit is highly beneficial for Brazil. Though the real riches were probably in duping gullible American customers by promising absurd health benefits – the New Yorker article also describes the trajectory of MonaVie, a pyramid scheme that sold açaí juice (together with other products) as if it were a pharmaceutical product for $50 a bottle that managed to move almost a billion dollars from 2005 to 2008.

Now that açaí is old news, what will be the next Brazilian fruit to make it so big? Buriti? Babaçu? If I had my way it would be licuri, a fruit with an oily, coconutty nut inside. In my region it used to be used for everything, from an ingredient in regional dishes to a (very smelly) source of oil for doing your hair. Thanks to the efforts of a cooperative in Capim Grosso it has grown as a specialty food for some Brazilian chefs, and a kilo can now fetch five times what it used to (and what it still does if you don’t sell through the cooperative), when the price could hardly justify the effort of breaking the shells off the nuts. But despite being a decent source of iron (see nutritional information in another blog I started about licuri for the cooperative, which is currently not being updated due to lack of access to source material), it probably isn’t attractive enough as a lifestyle item to make it big in the US. At least without absurd exaggeration of its health benefits.