Brazil is a box full of surprises. And Korin, an extremely atypical group of companies because it was founded 30 years ago by the Messianic World Church with donations from its believers. She is still the primary owner. With patience, perseverance, research and development and thanks to the growing popularity of healthy eating, they have become one of the largest organic producers in Brazil. The Messianists founded the company with a mission much more ambitious than generating income: “To create an earthly paradise through natural agriculture to rid the world of disease, poverty and conflict,” explains Korin Foods' top manager, the Messianic Luiz Carlos Dematte (59 years old, Serra Negra, São Paulo), in an interview via video call. Korin's apostolate, which began in business terms with the production of chickens raised without antibiotics. A revolution in Brazil in 1994.
Korin's organic products are on the shelves of major Brazilian supermarket chains and in their stores, but their special story is much less known to customers than their naturally fed chickens and their genuine taste.
Organic chickens from chickens fed non-transgenic corn and organic eggs are the hallmark of the best-selling products. Thanks to them, it has become a medium-sized company in this country's powerful agricultural sector, which is the third largest chicken producer in the world after the United States and China. Korin has expanded its offering to include hundreds of organic references, including grains, rice, beans, honey, coffee – and recently even fish – produced in five factories. They have 504 direct employees, according to Dematte, and another half a thousand indirect employees.
From the headquarters of Korin Foods in Ipeúna, 200 kilometers from São Paulo, the CEO explains that the expansion of natural agriculture is one of the pillars of the messianic teaching, a central mission to build that ideal world that the 1.8 This. founded in Japan Church has millions of believers spread throughout Brazil, where it was founded in the mid-20th century. Brazil, a diverse country like no other and with a deep belief in all faiths, is a fertile land for cocktails like this, unthinkable in other parts of the world.
Free-range chickens from Korin organic farms. Courtesy of Korin Organics
Although sales were already increasing when the pandemic suddenly struck, the fear it has caused among many consumers has boosted sales of organic products. Dematte doesn't want to go into numbers, but smiles. They are expanding.
In 2022, they processed 23,000 organic poultry, fresh and frozen, and 150,000 eggs every day, according to Exame magazine, which estimated the Korin Group's income in 2021 at 240 million reais (44 million euros, 48 million dollars), The majority was generated by the food subsidiary, which Dematte has managed since 2021.
The manager, who began his career as a veterinarian, has a doctorate in sustainable agriculture and also completed training at a business school. Like the company for many years, he moved “against the tide”. It was an alternative. It was his interest in the different types of cultivation, production in the field and nutrition in the face of the prevailing methods with all their chemicals and side effects on humans and the rest of living beings that led him to join the Messianic Church. , of which he is the minister.
The CEO explains that Korin companies treat the earth as a living being with feelings, according to the teachings of the founder, a “Japanese religious scholar” named Mokiti Okada. They believe that plants relate to each other, just as “chickens recognize each other, feel fear and joy, or have companionship,” he explains. For believers in the global messianic church, the earth's natural interaction with plants and animals results in food with vital energy that contributes to the healing of humanity.
Korin's formula for creating his organics is based on decades of observation of nature and how millions of microorganisms work together. The aim is to imitate and reproduce these sophisticated systems in order to optimize agricultural production without external and toxic agents such as pesticides, chemical fertilizers or hormones. They strive to achieve the biodynamic balance of the soil. The managing director explains that through extensive investments in research and development over these 30 years, they have managed to make their production processes increasingly efficient and be able to reproduce them on a larger scale. They now even produce their own bioinputs, biological products for agricultural production.
A woman chooses chilled products in a Korin store. Lela Beltrao
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