A Brejeiro Rice is among the largest industries in the Brazilian agribusiness. It was founded by the Italian Max Leonardo Defines the city of Orlandia.
Italian immigrant Max Leonardo Define (in Italy he was Massimo Leonardo) was born on June 16, 1916 in the city of Nápoles, located in the south of Italy, more precisely in the region of campania.
Like many Italians at that time, he came to Brazil with his parents as a teenager, with the aim of finding better work conditions.
Brejeiro, packaged rice
Arriving in the new country, he began his life working in Agudo Farm, in the municipality of Orlândia, in the interior of State of São Paulo, where its main source of income was charcoal production.
In 1944, at the age of 28, he founded Brejeiro, a Processing of Agricultural Products. This was the starting point for the Italian to become a pioneer in rice packaging in the country and start offering the product at fairs and grocery stores.
An important figure in the Brazilian agro-industrial sector, Define was also a founding partner of Mogiana Vegetable Oil Company (Comove), created in Orlândia in 1950, to produce soy oil, soy bran, hydrogenated fat, soy lecithin, soap and rice, bean, wheat, soy and corn seeds.
Furthermore, the Italian-Brazilian Max Leonardo Define was present in 1974 as one of the founders of Guabi, a feed manufacturing company, also based in Orlandia.
The swimming Italian
The industrialist's name is also marked in history as great sportsman, as he was two-time champion of the historic Crossing from São Paulo to Nado, a test that was held in the first half of the 1900s on the Tietê River, in São Paulo, between the Vila Maria Bridge and the entrance to the Esperia Club.
The race was contested between 1924 and 1944 and Max Define won in 1933 and 1934, when he was 17 to 18 years old. A curiosity is that the race, which had a 5,5 kilometer route, was won in 1935 and 1936 by John Havelange, who would later become president of the International Football Federation (FIFA).
At the time, the São Paulo Swimming Crossing was as popular an event as the São Silvestre race. While the future creator of Arroz Brejeiro fought to cross the Club Athletico Paulistano, João Havelange represented Fluminense in the swimming competitions in São Paulo.
Brejeiro rice in supermarkets
Returning to agribusiness, from the 1950s onwards, Brejeiro took advantage of the creation of supermarkets in Brazil to get ahead and innovate. It was the first Brazilian company to sell rice with a “brand” attached to the product.
At the same time, the company went further, and not only created a name and a logo, but a character, the Brejeirinho, who started to star in a series of advertisements that became famous on television, gaining attention, sympathy and customer loyalty.
As a result, the brand grew and, in the 1960s, it began to consolidate itself as the best-selling rice in the states of São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro. It was this growth that allowed the company to also start producing oil and rice bran, products that soon also took on the market leadership.
Diversification and export
In the 1970s, the group began to further diversify its products, entering the market with the soybean sector, with the launch of the brand oil Gorgeous.
In the following years, Brejeiro invested even more to improve the refinement of soybean oil and achieved a purer, clearer product with a flavor as neutral as the rice and cotton oils.
At the end of the 1990s, Brejeiro began producing soy lecithin and received certification Quality HACCP. By processing only non-transgenic soy, with guaranteed origin, Brejeiro began to export lecithin and soybean meal for different countries.
With this, the company gained a privileged position in the international market and ended up entering the production of hydrogenated vegetable fat.
Socially conscious company
From the 2000s onwards, with quality products and an excellent image on the world market, Arroz Brejeiro continued to add achievements, such as Certification Kosher (Orthodox Union, GMP+ certification e HALAL certification e IP).
Furthermore, since 2011 the company has been selling Biodiesel. In 2012, it received the concession of the right to use the Social Fuel Seal, identification granted by the Ministry of Agrarian Development to Biodiesel producers who promote social inclusion and regional development.
The concession was renewed in 2017, due to the generation of employment and income promoted by the company to family farmers in the region. National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture (Pronaf).
The success that came from work
In March last year, the magazine Forbes Brazil published the list of 100 largest Brazilian agribusiness companies in 2020 and Arroz Brejeiro was in 88th place, with revenue of R $ 1,27 billion.
A company that was born as cerealist, has diversified and today has three soybean crushing units (one in the interior of São Paulo and two in Goiás), three more seed processing plants (in São Paulo, Minas and Goiás), two rice processing plants in Rio Grande do Sul and ten warehouses to receive products directly from partner farmers.
Italian Max Leonardo Define, entrepreneur in the agribusiness and sportsman in youth, died in 2002, aged 86. He left family, friends and one more exemplary history of entrepreneurship that helped build Brazil.
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