Travel Diary: Sourcing Açai in the Amazon with Sambazon's Jeremy Black

"The farmest that harvest the açai climb the trees like someone would climb a tree for a coconut, and they bring them down these 'brooms.' They call them brooms because that's what they look like, with all those little white things coming off. So they bring those down, and with those gloves on, they basically just strip those little brooms of the berries."

"If you hopped in a speedboat or one of those other boats a little way off, this is the kind of scene you’d see. Those are all açai trees. This guy lives out in the forest. He harvests açai, and to get from place to place, he paddles around in his boat. See how high the trees are? They’re like 30 or 40 feet, and the trunk is skinny, but it's strong. I’ve seen people slice up their hands and shins trying to climb those trees, because you kind of wrap your arms and legs around shimmy up it like you would a fire pole. Even with the guys who do it a lot, they have the right boots and equipment. It’s like trying to climb a palm tree Tahiti to get a coconut—like, yeah, good luck."

"What you’re looking at is the Amazon River. These boats get loaded down with thousands of these baskets, full of açai, and get driven from up to 24-hour boat rides away from where our factory is. The boats don’t come very fast, but they can go a long way, and where our factory is in the Amazon, there are not a lot of roads. That's the dock of our factory, and you can see that it's slanted because the tides in the Amazon are really extreme. Sometimes it' level and sometimes it’s a really steep incline. You can see stacks of baskets, and these guy are just carrying two, three, four baskets at a time up the dock."

"This is just down the road from where the market is. It’s Macapá, the city closest to our factory. When you see that little red flag, which says “temos especial açai,” it basically means "we sell acai here." You see these little red signs all over the place. I love the colors of the buildings. The palms behind the blue building are actually açai palms."

"This is inside of our factory, where they get loaded from those baskets. The berries are being washed there, and then they’re soaked for about a half hour before they’re put through a machine that basically scrapes the skin off the seed. What you’re eating is the thick purple skin of the berry, which also has oil in it. So açai has the healthy oils that you get in olive oils, mixed with the dark, purple skin that you’d get in a blueberry."

"This is my fianceé, Luiza. I took this picture last New Year’s Eve—December 31, 2015, around 8:00 p.m., as the sun was setting. She’s doing an end-of-the-year meditation on the beach in Maresias—I think Maresias is one of the best beaches close to the city of São Paolo."

"This is a basket of açai seeds. Para planter means "to plant." That's a tiny little market in Santana, which is the little town where we built our factory. Açai is a regenerative crop, so when forests are cut down, it's great for regenerating the forest."

"That’s a school that we built. Part of our fair-trade project is that we’ve been building schools. We’ve built four in the last six years or so. This school serves 150 kids. It’s a few hours by speedboat from our factory. It would take most kids who live out in this zone three or four hours a day to get to and from the closest school, so a lot of them don’t even go to school. Now they can attend school without spending half a day in a boat. We’re building three more this year."

"This is at Maresias. This is a typical açai stand on the beach. You can see it says "açai na tigela," which means "in a bowl," and they’re almost like little ice cream carts. The cool thing about Brazil is everybody comes to the beach with next to nothing. For a buck, you get a chair, an umbrella, and there are guys walking by with everything you could possibly want to consume, from beer to oysters on the half shell. You need a hat, you need sunglasses, but everything else comes to you—you just sit there. It’s pretty fun."

"We looked at our supply chain and we realized that with all these açai berries that are going through our factory, we were getting mountains of seeds. What we figured out was that if the seeds were left to dry, they could be burned to provide the fuel people for fuel their furnaces, instead of using forest wood. So we found a local brick maker who was cutting down huge amounts of trees every year to make bricks to build houses. Now he’s using our seeds, which we give him for free, instead of cutting down swaths of forest. We also converted boilers in our factory so that we could run the factory partially off the seeds."

"Here's a beautiful image of stacks of açai berries that are waiting to be processed at our dock. Because açai is just the skin of this berry, it takes a lot of berries to make the pulp. If you buy one of our juices, it took about 100 of those berries to make that juice. There are massive amounts coming in and being processed everyday. It's been an interesting ride because of the amount of açai we actually need to process to make the product."

"This is Luiza again. She's at a little farmers market checking out different kinds of beans. This is called Pocos de Caldas, close to where she grew up near São Paolo. We were just loading up because there are so many amazing beans in Brazil. The diet in Brazil consists of a lot of rice and beans—they put beans in all kinds of stuff. So we like to load up before we come home so we have lots of good beans to cook here."

"There are beautiful parrots all over the Amazon. This is a wild parrot, but this is at an eco-hotel. Even though he’s wild, this parrot comes to this little spot because he knows there’s going to be food for him there."