São Salvador Alimentos (SSA), with factories in Itaberaí and Nova Veneza (Goiás), has implemented over 90 preventive measures against Covid-19 to ensure the safety of its employees, increase production, and maintain the quality of its SuperFrango and Boua brand products. “We must ensure the food safety of the markets where we operate in Brazil and abroad. We are a company where sanitary requirements were already and are higher than other industrial sectors, but we have expanded our measures as a precaution, especially for the safety of our more than 7.3 thousand direct and outsourced collaborators,” says the Administrative and Financial Director of SSA, Hugo Garrote.
The average production of the Goian industry, which sells its products in 9 states and the Federal District and exports to more than 65 countries, increased in the second half of March this year from 395 thousand to 410 thousand birds/day.
Most of the precautionary measures were already in place at SSA long before the new coronavirus pandemic, but all of them were reinforced in agreement with the Labor Public Prosecutor’s Office and municipal administrations. In addition, some new actions were implemented, such as the suspension of all employee travel and external visits to factories, suspension of non-mandatory training, intensification of cleaning and sanitizing of its facilities, implementation of remote work in administrative areas, release of high-risk employees, greater scheduling of entry and exit times for collaborators, implementation of acrylic dividers on cafeteria tables, and greater distancing among collaborators, daily temperature measurement of all employees, among dozens of other measures.
“We have been following what was happening in China, one of our main foreign markets, regarding Covid-19 since December last year. We started to reinforce the sanitary measures at our factories since January this year, and from February and March, we adopted other new measures,” says Hugo Garrote.
In addition to reinforcing and expanding the sanitary safety measures, SSA also took measures to ensure its food production, such as anticipating the purchase of supplies. “There was an increase in consumption in March and greater demand for our products. With the anticipation of the purchase of supplies, we were able to not only ensure the supply of thousands of SuperFrango and Boua product sales points in Brazil but also increase our daily production, maintain our costs, and consequently, maintain our prices in respect to our millions of consumers in Brazil and abroad,” highlights the SSA executive.
Another administrative measure adopted by the Goian industry, which has also allowed greater security in its operations during this period, is to reinforce the company’s cash to avoid the need to resort to the financial market. “We learned a lot from the 2018 crisis generated by the truck drivers’ strike in Brazil. With this, we anticipated several protocols to ensure the safety and quality of our operations and production. We always learn from all the adversity we face. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that our biosafety protocols are in tune with the highest market demands, but we have decided to expand them and also innovate in administrative and financial management,” says Hugo Garrote.
São Salvador Alimentos started production in March at its modern factory in the municipality of Nova Veneza (GO), 40 kilometers from Goiânia and 70 kilometers from Itaberaí (GO), the headquarters of the Goian company. The total investment in this first stage was R$ 255 million, with the creation of hundreds of direct jobs. The production capacity of the new factory in its first stage is 160 thousand birds/day, which represents a 50% increase in SSA’s total capacity.
