Sugarcane juice: a custom, fond memories
Having a cup of sugarcane juice at the roadside café or at a pastel fair stand is a typical Brazilian tradition. After all, many Brazilian has left home craving for the delicious beverage with the power to takes people back in time to their childhood, straight to that countryside family trip or the way down the mountain to the beach. It feels like magic: in every sip, sugarcane juice brings back memories and connects whomever sitting around, opening up a moment for a carefree chat and relax.
With that in mind, entrepreneur Maria Vitoria developed solutions to allow sugarcane juice to be more broadly available to costumers, with the same rigorous quality and perfect for consumption. In order to do so, it would be necessary to provide alternatives for the beverage to travel from being a street food to the supermarkets shelves and fruit stands and more importantly everyone’s dinner table.
Currently, Brazil is the world’s largest sugarcane producer, with more than eight million plantation hectares and circa 600 million tons of harvesting every year. This versatile plant moves the economy on sugarcane juice, ethanol, cachaça, melaço, rapatura among other products production.
"Brazil is the world’s largest sugarcane producer, with more than eight million plantation hectares"
The company
The company The Cana is 100% Brazilian, a fruit from the Guarapa Gourmet brand, which started the activities in 2019, aiming to naturally sweeten people’s lives with healthy and handmade food taking no added water, sugar, colorant or preservatives. It’s a fact that companies investing in a single raw material needs to present constant innovation. Because of that, in the past 2 years, the path taken by Maria Vitoria testifies daily the perseverance of women, mothers and entrepreneurs from Brazil, overcoming the odds and constantly reinventing themselves.
Since the beginning, The Cana has participated in significant regional gastronomy fairs such as Mesa Brazil, ANUFOOD Brasil, Empreender e Maternar among others. Apart from that, has also taken the opportunity to participate in the local finals of Feito em SP, classifying for the state finals of the São Paulo’s most important gastronomic festival, which happened at the Memorial da América Latina. In the occasion, the brand received the endorsement of a specialized panel of reputed professional chefs. Currently, The Cana is certified with two important seals for the gastronomy industry: the Cadastur, which regulates the quality of tourism services; and the Connect Americas, which supports and certifies the exportation to foreign markets.
Maria Vitoria: the entrepreneur
Maria Vitoria creator and CEO of the The Cana brand, holds a Portuguese Language degree, a Management and International Market certificate, is the mother of twins Donatela e Filipo and married to Rafael. She initiated the activities based on her professional experience with a multinational Dutch company, when also teaching Italian classes at a language center. Being a sugarcane juice lover herself, Maria Vitoria and her husband would often drive around Sorocaba seeking a hawker to get some refreshing and nostalgic beverage that could take them back in time to their childhood. Her journey as a businesswoman derives from the tenacity in solving the issue concerning the lack of sugarcane juice access, engineering an innovative business model supported by a cultural Brazilian tradition.
