Exporting to Brazil. First you work out who is in charge of your product.

In Brazil the first question isn't about the buyer or the price. It is about which authority decides whether your product can enter.

This guide applies to food in general. For two products the path changes before the country does: wine travels with excise and its accompanying document, and olive oil has marketing and labelling standards all of its own. Whoever exports one of the two to Brazil reads this guide and the product one.

This piece is part of the guide to export operations for the small food producer and it is deliberately short: on markets with two authorities and rules by category, a page that lists everything becomes wrong before it becomes useful.

The template, to download

Twelve rows in three blocks: choosing the track on the recipe, the five cumulative conditions for animal origin with who each depends on, the path for other foods, and the rows common to both (Chamber certificate, shipment, deadlines). At the bottom, the cells for track, approval status, registered products and the nearest deadline.

File	What it contains	Link
BrazilExcel, one sheet	The two tracks, the five conditions with who they depend on, the Status drop-down column and the cells for the data to keep to hand.	brasile-checklist-mapa-anvisa.xlsx

The files are free. There is no form in front of them, we don't ask for an address and we receive no notification when someone downloads them. The first two conditions for animal origin don't depend on you and can't be bought: the sheet puts them first because they are the ones to check before promising a date.

MAPA or ANVISA: the question that comes first

The division is by the nature of the product, not by commercial category. A cheese, a cured meat, a milk-based product fall under the Ministry of Agriculture. A vegetable preserve, a pasta, an oil, a baked product fall under the health agency.

The delicate point is mixed products, where a small share of animal ingredient moves the whole product onto the other track. It is the same problem the United Kingdom calls composite products, and it is settled the same way: by looking at the recipe, not the commercial label.

The five conditions for animal origin

The Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture lists, referring to Article 486 of Decree 9.013 of 2017, five conditions that must all hold together. The goods must come from countries whose health inspection system has been assessed or recognised as equivalent, and from facilities approved for export to Brazil.

The other three: the product must be «previamente registrados pelo DIPOA», must be labelled according to the specific rules, and must travel with a health certificate issued by the competent authority of the country of origin, that is, your ASL.

The first two conditions don't depend on you and can't be bought: they are relations between States and facility approvals. The last three depend on you, and they are the ones worth working on while the first are being checked.

Condition	Who it depends on	What to do
Country systemrecognised as equivalent	The relationship between Brazilian and Italian authorities. It isn't a company obligation.	Check it before promising a date. If recognition doesn't exist for your category, there is no short route.
Approved facilityfor export to Brazil	Your facility, through the approval procedure followed by the Italian authority.	Ask your ASL where the approval stands, and with what timing. It is the longest step.
Registered productwith DIPOA	The specific product, not the company. Each product is a case of its own.	Decide which products you really want to bring. Registering ten when you will sell two is wasted work.
Compliant labellingBrazilian rules	Yours, together with the importer who knows the local rules.	Check before printing the batch, with front-of-pack labelling in force since 2022.
Health certificatefrom the country of origin	The competent Italian authority, at your request.	Request it with the right notice: the timing can't be compressed, and the certification date can't follow the departure.

On the health certificate, which is the only one of the five points entirely in your hands and in the timing of an Italian body, the procedure is in how to request the health certificate for export.

The label with the magnifying glass on the front

The Brazilian health agency published new rules on nutrition labelling in October 2020, which came into force on 9 October 2022. ANVISA writes that the new rules «inova ao adotar a rotulagem nutricional frontal», that is, introduce nutrition labelling on the front of the pack.

For an Italian producer this is the hidden cost of the Brazilian market: not a document, but different artwork, which must be designed on the product's real content and checked before printing. Whoever arrives with the European label and has it translated discovers the problem when the batch is already done.

The logic is the same as for every other market: the label is checked before printing, as explained in the export label, country by country. Brazil only adds that here the check also covers the front of the pack, which is the part you sell with.

Duties and origin: no preference, for now

The European Union and Mercosur have concluded an agreement, which however isn't being applied. Until it is, there is no preferential origin towards Brazil: the buyer pays full duty and the EUR.1 plays no role.

The origin document that may be requested is the Chamber of Commerce certificate, which attests the «made in» and reduces nothing. The cost is modest and stated: at the Lecce Chamber of Commerce the certificate of origin with copy costs €10, each further copy €5. The distinction between the two documents, and why they get confused, is in EUR.1 or certificate of origin.

When approvals expire without anyone watching

Facility approvals, product registrations and recognitions all have an expiry, and none of these three clocks rings on its own. With one market they can be kept in mind; with Brazil, China and a third country the dates become about ten and are discovered late.

That is the point where deadlines should be taken out of memory and put in a place that watches them on its own, with operational deadline alerts. With a constraint that matters more than the technology, written in Ethics: the system prepares and flags, but no document goes out without a person having read and approved it.

Questions and answers