THE FIRST BRAZILIAN BEEF EXPORTS

The year 1914 saw the first experimental exports of frozen Brazilian beef to England. Europe was gearing up for World War I and needed supplies. Meat on the bone, complete half-carcasses, was frozen at the Barretos meat plant, at the time Companhia Frigorifica e Pastoril, whose major shareholders included director Antonio Prado, also member of the board of Companhia Paulista das Estradas de Ferro, the Sao Paulo railroad Company. On May 25, 1909, the stretch of track as far as Barretos was opened. In December of the previous year, the tracks had been tested, and the first locomotive arrived at the station with the ballast train.

The same year that the tracks reached the city, the shareholders of the Sao Paulo Railroad Company sent a request to Barretos city hall for authorization to build a refrigerated abattoir. To develop the enterprise, Companhia Frigorifica e Pastoril was created on April 11, 1910. The meat plant took three years to build and was run by a French company specializing in building industries in this line of business. A continuously working ammonium gas absorption refrigeration system was installed, designed in 1860 by Ferdinand Carre (1824- 1894), says Leopoldo Costa, of the "Stravaganza'' blog.

The meat plant, inaugurated in 1913, has a capacity of 500 steers a day. To support this daily kill, the meat plant hired cattle dealers in Goias and the Triangulo Mineiro region, who acquired lean cattle which were then fattened on the farms that the company had a ·quired in the region for this purpose. With the meat plant functioning, an agreement was reached with the Sao Paulo Railway to use a stretch of the railroad (from Jundiai to Luz station, in Sao Paulo), so that the wagons could run from Barretos to the Sao Paulo capital a and then to the port of Santos. Another agreement was signed with Central do Brasil railroads, from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro.

In 1919 Companhia Frigorífica e Pastoril leased the meat plant to the Brazilian Meat Company belonging to the UK's Vestey Group, which in 1923 purchased the meat plant, overhauled it and changed the name to Frigorifico, and began trading under the new name the following year.

The attempt to ship frozen meat over long distances was a matter of concern for the beef industry worldwide. In the 1950s, Chicago saw the first refrigerated shipment of steer carcasses. They were placed in ice-filled containers in direct contact with the meat, which led to fading and also affected the flavor.

In 1868, William Davies, a fishmonger from Detroit, patented a refrigerated wagon that used ventilators and metal cages where the carcasses were suspended over a refrigeration mixture of ice and salt. Shortly afterwards he sold the patent to George Hammond, an industrial beef tycoon, who began (together with Marcus Towle) installing the system in wagons for transporting beef to Boston.

The huge U.S. multinational beef company, Swift, created a subsidiary to develop the refrigerated wagons service, where the wagons were refrigerated with blocks of ice for transporting cattle carcasses. Between 1882 and 1890, the volume of beef that the company transported each year between Chicago and New York stood at 44,000 tons of slaughtered carcasses. The Swift system was also used by Companhia Frigorifica e Pastoril to transport to Santos its first batch of frozen carcasses, says Costa. From Santos the carcasses went to England on a ship of the Blue Star Line, the ocean shipping company of the Vestey Group. The company's ships were pioneers in using artificial refrigeration to tnmsport beef and other foodstuffs.

By Rosane Queiroz as "The Centenary of the First Exports" in "Brasil de Carne e Osso"/"The Bull by the Horns", ABIEC, Abook Editora, São Paulo,2015 excerpts p.179 e 181. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa