Protein-enriched foods are spreading across categories in Brazil, from yogurt and cereal bars to prepared meals and even beer, fueled by the rise of weight-loss drugs and a broader push toward healthier diets.
Unlike earlier trends such as organic and plant-based foods, the shift has staying power because consumers can readily understand the benefit they are buying, according to McKinsey partner Pedro Fernandes.
“What we’ve learned in recent years is that when a claim doesn’t offer a specific benefit, it becomes a fad that doesn’t take off,” Fernandes said at Bradesco BBI’s AgroSummit in São Paulo on Thursday.
Organic food illustrates the challenge. Even in widely consumed categories such as chicken, the concept can be difficult to communicate to Brazilian consumers.
Telling shoppers that a product was “raised without antibiotics,” for example, delivers a clearer message than calling it organic, Fernandes said. Claims such as “zero sugar” or “more protein” are similarly straightforward.
Plant-based meat substitutes faced a comparable problem. As recently as 2021, McDonald’s was promoting a partnership with Beyond Meat to supply plant-based burgers, as expectations mounted that meat alternatives would become mainstream.
“There is a niche for it, but it didn’t become as popular as expected,” Fernandes said. As vegetarianism expands, he said, consumers are increasingly seeking naturally protein-rich vegetables rather than products designed to mimic meat.
Nutrition
A few years ago, when consumer preferences were less clear, expectations for explosive growth in plant-based foods reached the boardrooms of some of Brazil’s biggest agribusiness companies, including JBS and Amaggi.
JBS Chief Executive Officer Gilberto Tomazoni recalled a conversation with Brazilian agribusiness executive Blairo Maggi after Maggi returned from Silicon Valley.
“I remember Blairo coming back from Silicon Valley and telling me, ‘We’re going to have to produce this stuff, turn everything into peas,’” Tomazoni said.
JBS took a majority stake in Spain’s BioTech Foods in 2021 to pursue commercial-scale cultivated protein production. Two years later, the meatpacker built a research laboratory in Florianópolis, southern Brazil, as part of its efforts in the field.
While the trend itself failed to take off as expected, those investments helped lay the groundwork for JBS to capitalize on the broader protein boom. The research gave the company deeper expertise in areas including DNA, RNA and cellular aging.
JBS is now looking for ways to extract more value from raw materials already present in its production chain, identifying potentially useful attributes that can be incorporated into products at increasingly lower costs.
“How can we take proteins that we currently send to animal feed and identify peptides or amino acids in them that can help us develop precision nutrition?” Tomazoni said.
The opportunity is already generating significant revenue in the U.S., one of the world’s largest consumer markets.
Just Bare, JBS’s U.S. brand of fresh and frozen chicken raised without antibiotics and sold without added hormones or steroids, has reached $1 billion in sales and captured a 15% market share in five years, according to Tomazoni.
“To me, the big change is the recognition of protein’s nutritional value,” Tomazoni said. “This is a major shift that isn’t going backward. It’s not a wave — it’s structural.”
This story was translated from the original Portuguese with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by The AgriBiz editorial staff.
