Cica: what happened to the tomato extract brand that dominated Brazil in the 80s

The tomato paste market in Brazil was once dominated by a single company for over three decades. Between the 1950s and 1980s, a brand from Jundiaí, in the interior of São Paulo, dictated what Brazilians put on their plates, and created one of the most enduring advertising partnerships in the country's history. Cica, an acronym for Companhia Industrial de Conservas Alimentícias, was born in 1941 from the union of Italian immigrant families: Alberto Bonfiglioli, the brothers Salvatore and Antonino Messina, and the Guerrazzi and Guzzo families. The flagship product was the Elephant triple concentrated tomato paste, made with selected tomatoes, without skin and seeds. The brand became so strong that, in the 1980s, Cica was the largest producer of food preserves in Brazil and Latin America, with 167,000 square meters of constructed area in Jundiaí. The company ceased to exist in 2003, when Unilever removed the Cica name from its products. The original Jundiaí factory had been closed ...