End of the food truck era exposes street food challenges in SP

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Fabrício Moreira, 37, swapped portions of pasta and stroganoff for the wheel of Uno 2021. Marcos Paulo Benício, 45, gave up making daily marmitex and pizza dough to serve a schedule of clients looking for real estate. Márcio Silva, 51, continues to prepare hamburgers – no longer on the four wheels of the Mercedes Benz trucks that circulated in the city of São Paulo, but at a fixed point in Pinheiros, on the west side of the city.

Nine years after being sanctioned by the then mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad (PT), in December 2013, law 15,947, which regulates street food in the capital of São Paulo, has stopped attracting entrepreneurs. Presented as a great incentive to take street vendors out of informality and, at the same time, bring chefs to the streets of the largest city in the country, offering affordable versions of starry dishes, the law left something to be desired by inhibiting the free movement of vendors through the streets. City.

This is what made the hundreds of food trucks that started circulating through São Paulo disappear from the capital in 2013 (in 2019, there were around 600). Today they are the exception in the neighborhoods and can be found most of the time at events.

At the same time, starting in 2020, the pandemic took part of the 12.3 million inhabitants of São Paulo off the streets – many of them started to work at home. Also part of university students, who used to go straight from work to class or vice versa, now study online.

That’s what made a market estimated at 10% of the total away-from-home food sector, which now totals R$ 543 billion a year, wither in the country, according to Abia (Brazilian Food Industry Association).

“I sold around 120 meals a day”, says Fabrício Moreira, who worked next to the Uninove campus in Barra Funda, in the western part of São Paulo. “Classes were supposed to return after Carnival in 2020, but they never did. I was forced to stop,” says Moreira, who worked Monday through Friday at a pasta cart. “People came straight to college from work and had dinner before going to class.”

Moreira earned around R$ 20,000 per month with the cart, his profit was around R$ 5,000 per month. She employed an assistant and relied on her mother and sister to help prepare meals. It had a Term of Permission to Use (TPU), the first licenses to explore street food granted by the city of São Paulo.

Today he works as an app driver and manages to raise R$ 3 thousand a month, net. “I don’t go back to the street anymore”, says Moreira. “The movement dropped in relation to what it was before the pandemic. In the region where I worked, there is no longer a flow that justifies putting the business there again. And the city hall always teased us: there had to be another TPU to place a bank on the sidewalk, I couldn’t sell anything beyond what was specified in the term, it was a lot of bureaucracy.”

Marcos Paulo Benício also has no plans to return to the streets anytime soon. He also had a cart for selling mini pizzas near Uninove in Barra Funda. He even sold 150 snacks a night. “But competition increased, many people began to explore the region at the same time”, he recalls.

That’s when, a year before the pandemic, he started offering marmitex to those who worked in the vicinity of the subway in Barra Funda. “My TPU was for snacks at night and the city hall wouldn’t let me sell meals in the afternoon”, he recalls, who says he was forced to pay bribes to get the license at the time. “The people who charged me worked in the subprefecture of Lapa, where a corruption scheme involving inspectors was discovered”, he recalls.

The report of Sheet found that there is a parallel trade in TPUs in the city – sale and rental of points, which is prohibited by law. Only the permission holder has the right to exploit the point.

With the pandemic, Benício continued working with delivery, in a kitchen set up in the hall of a church near his home. “I made a canteen in the space, I managed to deliver meals, but the local parish priest, a denialist, wanted us to open the hall for face-to-face service, even when everything was closed for fear of the contagion of Covid”, he recalls.

He ended up giving up the business and today works as a realtor. In his spare time, he is also an app driver. “I even want to go back to gastronomy, but I need to restructure myself”, says Benício, who lost his savings during the pandemic. “I want to buy a food truck and start working with events.”

Márcio Silva has the same expectation. He started working with a food truck in 2013, shortly before street food legislation was passed in São Paulo. He was successful with two Buzina Burger trucks, which operated in the regions of Vila Madalena and Itaim Bibi, neighborhoods in the west zone of São Paulo with a busy nightlife. In the case of Itaim Bibi, the region is also home to offices and Avenida Faria Lima, the center of São Paulo’s financial market.

“A lot of people are at home office, which is the antithesis of street food”, says Silva. He claims to have noticed the decline in the food truck market even before the pandemic. “Brazilians are not used to street food, to eating standing up, they want to have at least one bench to sit on,” he says. “He also thinks that, because it’s on the street, the food has to be much cheaper than that of a snack bar or a restaurant”, says Silva. “But it’s not, if it’s made with good ingredients, it’s just a little bit cheaper.”

Besides, says the businessman, Brazilians don’t like to change the menu very much. “In New York, in addition to the trucks having freedom of movement through the streets, they are not restricted to a fixed point, the variety of dishes is much greater: there is Thai, Mexican, Greek, Chinese food, you name it”, he says. “Here, Buzina started out serving meals. But we’ve spent the last three years selling a dish, a salad and seven types of hamburgers, that’s all people eat.”

After reaching a sale of 3 thousand sandwiches per month, he sold one of the trucks, in 2019, with the slowdown of the business. In 2021, he sold the second truck, already after the pandemic. He had paid BRL 230,000 for the two trucks. He ended up selling the vehicles for R$150,000. He laid off 12 employees. Today he maintains the Buzina hamburger shop in Pinheiros, opened in 2017.

“We’re fine, selling around 6,000 snacks a month,” he says. “But we still have debts contracted in the pandemic. I want, in the future, to have a truck again, but smaller and only to work with events on weekends”, says Silva, who feels guilty for having encouraged, in the past, many entrepreneurs a tried the street food.

Between 2015 and 2018, he starred in the reality show “Food Truck – A Batalha”, on the GNT channel, alongside Adolf Schaefer, owner of Holy Pasta Food Truck. “The people who continued on the street are selling between 40% and 60% less”, says Silva.

Márcio Silva is a critic of the so-called “food parks” – large rented spaces in neighborhoods where trucks were parked, serving the public. “It took away the essence of street food, you had to plan to eat there instead of finding a place selling good food on your way,” he says. “Besides, the rent was too expensive.”

The city of São Paulo once had around 30 food parks, says Mauricio Schuartz, partner at the audiovisual production company KQi, responsible for the program “Chefes na Rua”, broadcast on the Travel Box Brazil channel. Schuartz was behind some of these developments, such as Food Park Butantã and Food Park Marechal, in the west and central areas of São Paulo, respectively. The first closed its doors in July 2020, in the first year of the pandemic.

“Paulista Avenue, on Sundays [quando o espaço fica fechado para carros], it’s an incredible place for a food park”, says Schuartz. “I think there is a huge vacuum in the capital for street food, the entrepreneur needs to understand the needs of this new post-pandemic public and have fewer legal obstacles to touch the business. “I think the rules have evolved since 2014.”

SP receives 30 daily authorization requests for street food

The City Hall of São Paulo informed the Sheet that the number of licenses for street food has returned to pre-pandemic levels in the last year. “We are releasing between 50 and 60 authorization ordinances per day for sale on the street, half of which is for food”, says Maria Albertina Afonso Henke, director of the Tô Legal Program of the city of São Paulo.

Established in 2019, Tô Legal sought to enable the installation of street vendors in 70% of the city’s streets. In the specific case of street food, it worked as an evolution in relation to TPUs, says Albertina.

“While the TPUs determined a fixed location for the licensee, Tô Legal, through authorization ordinances, allows the seller to register to work in a given location from 1 to 90 days, being able to continue in the space where he is after this period or choose another”, says the executive, highlighting that the entire process can be done online, on the program’s website.

The fee to obtain the license varies according to the value of the ‘fiscal court’ required, the same reference used to calculate the IPTU. But the report found that, in central regions of the city of São Paulo, the rate is around R$900 for a maximum period of 90 days, considering six days a week, for two periods (morning, afternoon, night).

Considering data from the last January 5th, there were 1,132 TPUs and 1,567 authorization ordinances for street food in São Paulo, granted by the Municipal Secretariat of Subprefectures. The five most demanded trades are: snacks, skewers, pastel, cakes and biscuits and hot dogs.

“With the pandemic, food entrepreneurs needed to reinvent themselves, which was also true for street food vendors”, says Helena Andrade, project manager at Sebrae-SP. According to her, many people who became unemployed ended up resorting to selling food, even using social networks to try to secure customers. “It’s an evolution for those who previously only used the pamphlet”, she says.

Helena recalls, however, that the margins of food entrepreneurs were squeezed by the inflation of food and packaging. “The growth of delivery, in line with new consumption habits, also takes an important piece of revenue from entrepreneurs”, she says. On average, delivery apps charge 27% of the gross product value.

Manoel Salvino da Silva, 55, was forced to switch to street trading in 2022. After running snack bars inside two public parks in the capital – at Ibirapuera, for 15 years, and at Villa-Lobos, for 18 years [–, ele viu a renovação do contrato ser negada depois que os espaços foram concedidos à iniciativa privada.

O empresário e seus sócios partiram, então, para o trailer de lanches que já tinham adquirido em Moema, na zona sul de São Paulo. “A gente abria só aos fins de semana, para atender ao movimento do Parque das Bicicletas, que fica próximo. Mas passamos a abrir todo dia depois que entregamos as lanchonetes”, afirma.

O movimento das ruas está fraco, diz o empresário, mas ainda assim ele consegue vender cerca de 400 lanches por mês. “Isso é mais de fim de semana. Durante a semana, o que vende é bebida, por conta do parque”, diz Salvino da Silva, que está animado mesmo é em voltar a ter um ponto fixo. Vai inaugurar em março a lanchonete Sabor Ibira, mesma marca que usava nos parques.

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