Ventures · Instituto CEASA

Instituto CEASA: what it is and why it matters

Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front founded by Bairo Gonzalez, proposes turning wholesale-market surplus into food that lasts two years unrefrigerated.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published 2 October 2026

Instituto CEASA is the humanitarian front founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, with the Food Life project: a plant that proposes turning the surplus from Brazil's wholesale food markets into food that lasts up to two years without refrigeration, so that it reaches those who need it.

The pain behind it

There was a time, in Bairo's life, when, he says, fifty people depended on him and he had nothing left to offer. Anyone who has been through that knows the first question is not about money. It is about the table: what will these families eat tomorrow?

That question never left his mind. Years later, building CEASA Bank inside the wholesale food markets, he began to see its flip side every day. At the end of the workday, good food left over because it wasn't sold in time. A few kilometers away, people not knowing whether they will have dinner.

Bairo sums up the Institute's vision in one idea: a place where hunger stops being the problem and the pain. Not as charity that passes, but as a road that stays, linking the surplus on one side to the lack on the other.

How it works, in plain words

The Food Life process fits in five verbs.

Collect. The markets' surplus, fruit and vegetables that are still good and were not sold, is collected before it becomes waste.
Sort. What is usable becomes raw material; what isn't goes elsewhere.
Process. The food is cooked in an autoclave, the same principle of sterilization by heat and pressure the canning industry has used for decades.
Package. The finished product is designed to last up to two years without refrigeration.
Ship. The food goes where it is lacking, without depending on a cold chain or constant power.

Each donation or supply can have its origin, transport and delivery recorded on BTZ Chain, so that those who fund it and those who receive it see the same path.

Who it is for

Families facing food insecurity, in cities and, above all, in the countryside.
Isolated communities and disaster-hit regions, where there is no refrigerator, power or good road.
Governments, school meal programs and humanitarian agencies, which need food that lasts and travels well.
Wholesale markets and stallholders, who want to give a dignified destination to what is left over.

The market

Waste is the size of the world. In 2022, 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in retail, food service and households, 19% of everything available to consumers, according to the Food Waste Index Report 2024 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

In Brazil, the raw material exists at scale: the 54 Ceasas tracked by Conab sold 16.6 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables in 2025 (Conab). And so does the need: in 2023, 27.6% of Brazilian households experienced some degree of food insecurity and 4.1% were in severe food insecurity; in rural areas, moderate or severe insecurity reached 12.7%, compared with 8.9% in cities, according to IBGE's Continuous National Household Sample Survey (Agência Gov).

The trend pushes in the same direction. Target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for halving food waste by 2030, and extreme weather events increase demand for food that keeps without refrigeration.

Where it stands today

Instituto CEASA and Food Life are being set up. The two-years-without-refrigeration product is the design goal and depends on a stability study and registration with the competent authorities before it reaches any table. The Institute's official website is institutoceasa.org (site under construction).

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 economics only make sense if they reach those who are on the outside.

Why it scales and why it matters

The raw material exists at any wholesale food market in the world. The autoclave process is well known and replicable. And the product travels without a cold chain, which makes it possible to serve places ordinary logistics can't reach. Each plant can be built near a market and serve an entire region.

The design envisions the mission sustaining itself with revenue from the plant itself, such as supplying public programs and humanitarian agencies, without depending on sporadic donations or on the price of any token.

Why does it matter? Because, in the ecosystem Bairo designed, everything is measured in lifetime. If the BICOIN yardstick is a reminder that a minute of life has value, Food Life is the front that takes care of the conditions for those minutes to exist. A life is sustained, before anything else, when the body is fed.

It is a vision, and he tells it without rushing to make it look finished.

Bairo's role

Bairo is the founder of Instituto CEASA and the mind behind Food Life. He is the one who connected the two ends he saw every day: the markets' surplus, which he knew through CEASA Bank, and hunger, which he knew up close at the time when many people depended on him.

Of all the fronts he founded, it may be the one most faithful to the man who, at rock bottom, learned the weight of fifty tables.