In the early 1980s a young man called Ilson Mateus was working as a gold miner in the Brazilian state of Para. He heard about a town in the neighbouring state of Maranhao called Balsas that, he was told, had struck a different type of gold – soy beans. Mateus decided to take what he had saved, buy a truck and fill it with boxes of drinks to sell to the workers in the burgeoning soy fields that surrounded the town.
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In less than a year, Mateus had two trucks.
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