Just when it seemed that Brazil’s meat industry had no more surprises, following the Perdigão-Sadia merger that created Brasil Food, Marfrig now joins the group of Brazilian companies
buying up plants in Argentina.

 

The Marfrig Group has added a new plant to its facilities: the Mirab plant. Mirab is a company that produces beef jerky (cured or cooked beef cut into strips, which is known as ‘jerky’ from the Quechua word ‘charqui,’ which means ‘to burn meat’), and Marfrig’s new acquisition is located in the Pilar Industrial Park, in the province of Buenos Aires.

 

Mirab is one of the world’s leading beef jerky producers, processing products for sale under third-party brands. This plant is the eight purchased by Marfrig in Argentina in the last year.

 

In 2008, the Marfrig Group was the fourth beef producer in the world, after acquiring a number of plants owned by Moy Park: 6 in England and two in Northern Ireland (which made it the fourth largest company in the UK); two in France and one in Holland. It also purchased four meat-packing facilities owned by the OSI Group in Brazil.

 

With the purchase of the Moy Park and OSI Group plants, Marfrig became one of the leading beef suppliers of the European wholesaler networks Texco and Sainsbury’s, and of fast food chains such as McDonald's and KFC.

 

This Brazilian transnational corporation is the ninth-largest poultry processor in the world and the fifth-largest pork meat producer in Brazil. Last year, Marfrig was valued at 2.13 billion dollars.
 

According to an article by Argentinean journalist Alejandra Groba, posted online at www.cronista.com, the meat-packing plants owned by Marfrig in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina slaughter a combined daily total of 21,100 heads of cattle, almost half of all the cattle slaughtered in Argentina.