I took off the freezing Thursday afternoon (19) to walk around the Apas Show – a gigantic fair organized by Associação Paulista de Supermercados.
When I say walk, I mean it very seriously: the mobile application recorded 7.2 km of walking and 10,682 steps through Expo Center Norte, in São Paulo, where around 800 exhibitors set up their tents.
The fair covered absolutely everything related to the sector: surveillance systems, tax consultancy, gondola manufacturers and even those forklifts that compete for space with shopping carts in the cash and carry store.
My focus was on products, specifically food and beverages. Each booth was an open-mouthed invitation to wine, sandwich, pizza and barbecue.
In an importer of sweets and toys, half a dozen semi-bald uncles gathered around a beer hall, in a childlike setting painted in shocking pink and CET yellow. Bizarrely funny, somewhat disturbing.
It’s the typical free lunch that is too expensive: to wait for a meal and a sip, the price is to tolerate salesman’s talk. Something I resignedly do at wine fairs, not Apas.
There, I went looking for brand strategies to deceive the consumer, to induce him to buy feline for leporino. Things like the sirloin steak burger and the prime rib sandwich.
These pranks thrive in supermarkets, and the Apas fair was the best place to catch up on the rascal tricks.
The corner of a candy maker advertises the two-fruit candy – apple with cherry or peach with tangerine – which in reality has no fruit at all, just an artificial aroma. The mathematical feat of performing the 1+1 = 0 operation.
In the space of a large brand of so-called healthy drinks, a sign has a photo of three “probiotic shots” called “energy”, “relax” and “immune”. Respectively, they contain guarana, passion fruit and lemon juice. I want to see Covid-19 defeat this lemon!
Every little word is important in the semantics of packaging. Changing the preposition “from” to “with”, for example, makes a crucial difference.
You may have already noticed that frozen codfish balls, for some time now, are dumplings with cod. That’s because cod is not the predominant ingredient in the recipe, it comes in mixed amounts.
The dumplings went to Apas and they weren’t alone. There was also a certain “pasty candy with milk”, the major component of which is sugar mixed with whey and, in third place, milk.
With the exact appearance of dulce de leche, this paste comes in 10 kg buckets to supply confectioneries that will send the semantic filigrees to the cucuias. The sugar candy with whey will be converted into dulce de leche for the final consumer.
The champion of debauchery is a powdered mixture for bread, like a boxed cake in industrial quantities, to serve bakeries that only follow the instructions on the package. The name of the thing: artisanal farm bread. It is not enough to be handmade, it has to be from the farm.
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