Company

C.Vale is an agro-industrial cooperative operating in Paraná, Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul and Paraguay. It has 179 business units, more than 24,000 associates and more than 12,000 employees. It stands out in the production of soy, corn, wheat, cassava, milk, chicken, fish and swine, and operates in the provision of services, with more than 260 professionals who provide agronomic and veterinary assistance to associates. To keep the cooperative members technologically updated, C.Vale develops courses, lectures, training and field days.

C.Vale also finances production, guaranteeing credit to cooperative members, especially small producers. The company sells inputs, parts, accessories and resells agricultural machinery, ensuring more competitive prices for its associates. It also produces soybean seed in Santa Catarina, which is sold throughout Brazil. In addition, the cooperative maintains a supermarket chain with eight stores in Paraná, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul.

In the industrial segment, C.Vale produces modified cassava starch and animal feed. In this same segment, the cooperative maintains a poultry complex with a slaughtering capacity of 600,000 chickens/day. It is the first Brazilian poultry integration system, on a commercial scale, to use automated processes to control the environment.

The lack of places to store the production, the difficulties in the flow of the crop and the lack of credit and technical assistance led a group of 24 farmers to found, on November 7, 1963, the Cooperativa Agrícola Mista de Palotina Ltda (Campal) . In 1969, the cooperative’s activities began effectively with the receipt of wheat in the warehouse of a mill in Palotina. In 1970, construction began on the cooperative’s first warehouse, which was ready at the beginning of the following year.

The rapid growth in production led Campal to start the physical structuring phase with the construction of units to receive cereals in the municipality of Palotina. With the territorial division of the western region between the cooperatives, Campal expanded beyond the borders of Palotina, which led the associates to change the company’s name, in 1974, to Cooperativa Agrícola Mista Vale do Piquiri Ltda (Coopervale) . In 1981, Coopervale started to operate in Mato Grosso and, in 1984, in the state of Santa Catarina.

In the early 1990s, Coopervale created a Modernization Plan by listening to thousands of associates, in a work coordinated by Alfredo Lang, who would assume the presidency of the cooperative in 1995. In that year, Coopervale began to implement the plan to make the company more competitive and start the process of adding value to primary products. It was the beginning of a new era for the cooperative. The start of this stage took place in October 1997, when the C.Vale poultry complex was inaugurated. This project gave associates the opportunity to produce chicken on a large scale. Another important aspect of the activity is the traceability of the production chain. The cooperative maintains a computerized system that allows access to the procedures used for the production of raw materials (soybean and corn), including the manufacture of animal feed, management and industrialization of birds. The objective is to guarantee food safety to consumers of chicken meat.

Industrialization expanded in 2002 with the start of operations at a starch factory in Assis Chateaubriand.

On November 21, 2003, a statutory amendment changed the corporate name from Cooperativa Agrícola Mista Vale do Piquiri Ltda (Coopervale) to C.Vale – Cooperativa Agroindustrial.

In January 2004, C.Vale started doubling the chicken slaughterhouse and building the poultry thermoprocessing industry, works that were inaugurated on April 8, 2005. Production capacity increased from 150,000 to 600,000 birds /day.

Another historic event occurred in 2009, when C.Vale closed an agreement with Coopermibra, a cooperative based in Campo Mourão, and started to operate in the center-west of Paraná. Under the agreement, C.Vale started to operate 19 Coopermibra grain receiving units.

Six years later, in 2015, C.Vale entered into a partnership with Marasca and took over the operations of 26 units of the cereal producer from Rio Grande do Sul, starting to operate in Rio Grande do Sul.

The agro-industrialization process advanced even further in 2017 with the opening of a fish slaughterhouse with a processing capacity of 150,000 tilapias/day. The enterprise started a new integration system that started to generate more income and jobs.

C.Vale finances production, guaranteeing credit to members. The company also sells inputs, parts, accessories and resells agricultural machinery. In addition, it produces soybean seeds in Santa Catarina. The cooperative also maintains a supermarket chain with eight stores in Paraná, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul.

Following this strategy, the cooperative put into operation, in 2020, a second chicken slaughterhouse. The industry, located in Umuarama (PR), was implemented through a partnership with Pluma Agroavícola and has a slaughtering capacity of 200,000 birds/day. That same year, C.Vale incorporated Agropar, a cooperative based in Assis Chateaubriand (PR).

In 2021, C.Vale incorporated Cooatol Cooperativa Agroindustrial, from Toledo, and took over 19 business units in nine municipalities in Paraná and one in Santa Catarina.

C.Vale’s performance in 2021
Total production received: 4.7 million tons
Number of associates: 24,633
Number of employees: 12,388
Revenue: R$ 17.442 billion
Taxes and contributions: R$ 534 million

C.Vale in Brazil
It is among the two largest single cooperatives in Brazil.