The future
Instituto CEASA: a future where hunger is no longer the pain
Bairo Gonzalez's vision for Instituto CEASA: surplus from wholesale supply centers turned into food that lasts two years outside the fridge.
On the same early morning a truckload of tomatoes goes into the trash, someone, a few kilometers away, goes to sleep hungry.
Today
Instituto CEASA is the humanitarian venture of the ecosystem. Its most recent project is a factory of foods that last up to two years outside the refrigerator, produced by autoclave, the same principle of sterilization by heat and pressure used for decades in the canning industry. The raw material is the surplus of the wholesale supply centers: good food left over because it wasn't sold in time.
Alongside the Institute, 1420mhz.org was born, which Bairo defines as a channel of communication and elevation. The idea that unites the two is the same: technology and the economy only make sense if they reach those left outside.
The pain he saw
Bairo knows the wholesale supply centers from the inside. He has seen what happens at the end of the day to what didn't sell: fruit that ripened too much, greens that wilted a little, an entire lot that missed its sales window. Food that would feed families, thrown out over a matter of hours.
And he knows hunger another way too. He has been broke, not knowing how he'd pay the month's bills, with people depending on him. He knows hunger isn't just the lack of food on the plate. It's shame, exhaustion, the impossibility of thinking about anything else. A hungry person doesn't dream. They survive.
The world's numbers confirm what he saw. The UN report on food waste (UNEP, 2024) estimates that 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in 2022, about 19% of what reached consumers. Meanwhile, according to the SOFI 2025 report, about 673 million people went hungry in 2024. The food exists. What's missing is the path.
The future he sees
2030. He imagines the first factory running next to a wholesale supply center, receiving at the end of the day what used to be discarded. The food is processed the same day, packed, and comes to last months without refrigeration. He sees this food reaching community kitchens, shelters, schools, regions hit by flood or drought, places where a refrigerator is precisely what's missing.
2040. In the future Bairo describes, there's a factory next to every large supply center, in Brazil and in other countries the ecosystem has reached. CEASA Bank records what's left over; the Institute transforms it; the logistics network carries it. He imagines an earthquake, a flood, a crisis meeting ready stocks, not promises of donations. And hunger ceasing to be a community's main problem, so that it can, at last, attend to other pains.
2050. On the long horizon, he imagines a world in which throwing food away sounds as strange as leaving a tap running all night sounds today. In which one region's surplus is another's reserve. And in which a child, learning at school about the hunger of the early century, asks how it was possible for there to be so much food and so many hungry people at the same time.
It's a vision. Bairo knows that between the vision and the plate lies a long road of work, health regulations and logistics. That's the road he wants to walk.
What this changes in a person's life
Imagine Josefa, who coordinates a community kitchen in a neighborhood on the city's outskirts. Every Monday she doesn't know how many meals she'll manage to serve. It depends on donations, and donations depend on luck.
In the future Bairo imagines, a batch of ready-to-eat food arrives at Josefa's kitchen, made from the surplus of the city's supply center, lasting more than a year in the cupboard. She stacks the boxes in the pantry and, for the first time, plans a menu for the whole month.
Josefa no longer has to choose who eats first. And the neighborhood children, who used to arrive at school thinking about lunch, begin arriving thinking about something else.