Move over açaí – the Amazon has more ‘superfoods’ to offer

In a lab in a renovated warehouse on the banks of a churning, brown river in Belém, Brazil, machines are pulping candidates for the next global “superfood”.

Cupuaçu… Taperebá… Bacaba… Like açaí berries – these fruits are rich in antioxidants, fibre or fatty acids.

If Brazil has its way, they could soon be popping up on your social media feeds and being sold in fashionable cafes in the UK, Europe and the US.

It’s part of a bold plan by the country, which is hosting the COP30 UN climate talks, to tackle climate change, protect nature and create wealth in the face of considerable regional poverty.

“There’s a lot of superfoods in the forest that people don’t know,” says Max Petrucci, founder of a local company Mahta that sells powdered cacao and Brazil nuts for shakes.

The drink he gives me to try is gritty and tastes like chocolate without sugar.

“We’re focussed first on nutrition and the health benefits that these Amazonian ingredients provide,” he explains.

But the second benefit, he explains, is “social and environmental”. He says they pay fair prices and only buy from farmers who practice sustainable farming.

It sounds like a marketing pitch and the company’s slick packaging promises “ancestral ingredients” and the “power of purple fruits from the forest”.

Scientific research into the benefits of “superfoods” is limited, but eating Amazonian fruits is generally recognised to be good for you.

Larissa Bueno, also at Mahta, explains that they only sell powdered foods – “similar to Huel in the UK,” she says.

Transporting raw fruits that degrade within days of picking is expensive. But if companies freeze dry ingredients into powders to sell to supermarkets or ship abroad, “it keeps more of the nutritional value and it’s a smart way to keep more economic value in Brazil”, she explains.

The lab in Belém’s Bioeconomy Park is helping small companies test new ways of preserving fruits.

“People have been eating from these forests for more than 10,000 years. There are many, many, many undiscovered superfoods, ” Max says.

The Amazon rainforest, which covers 6 million sq km (2.3 million sq miles), has always been full of natural wealth. But for decades its vast ecosystem has been decaying, with areas chopped down to sell timber or clear space for cattle or crops like soy.

This damaged one of the earth’s great protections against climate change – trees that soak up planet-warming carbon dioxide.

Unusually, more than two-thirds of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions come from land use and agriculture, rather than energy like most countries. Those emissions mainly stem from cutting down forest or growing vast amounts of food.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has promised to halve deforestation by 2030. In the 12 months to July 2025, rates reached an 11-year low.

But the forest is a resource. The nearly 30 million people living in the Amazon region, and across Brazil, need and want to make a living.

Brazil is pushing the idea of building a prospering economy by sustainably using natural resources, preserving nature to protect the vitality of the land, and developing valuable products including fuels, pharmaceuticals, and foods.

Building this “bio-economy” features strongly in its national climate action plan.

Sarah Sampaio runs a small coffee company that grows coffee beans in the shadow of trees, using a method called agroforesty – or agriculture that helps cultivate forests.

She works with around 200 farming families in the Apui region, which has one of the highest rates of deforestation.

“We plant native Amazonian trees and the coffee together. The trees shade the coffee plants and farmers can also grow their own food around those plants,” she says.

“When the coffee plant dies, the trees remain as the forest, so it’s helping to restore the Amazon.”

The fresh brew I’m given has a light, fruity taste, and she’s proud that three of her coffees were selected among the 30 best in Brazil in the national Coffee of the Year competition.

“If we want to stop more trees from being chopped down, we have to provide people with an alternative income, a sustainable way of living,” Sarah says.

Whatever the next Amazonian superfood is, it will need to challenge açaí. The purple berry is grown and eaten in huge quantities in northern Brazil and sold for nearly £10 ($13) per smoothie bowl in parts of London.

Damien Benoit sells açaí ice cream in Europe. “It’s very high in antioxidants, in fibres and unsaturated fatty acids, and in different minerals that make it very popular among people who do sports,” he says.

He works with families who keeps four hectares of açai plants in the forest “with a minimum number of species per hectare that must be monitored.”

“We make sure children go to school, and gender equality is a huge topic for us,” he claims.

On their own, these small companies cannot feed millions of people and, so far, they’ve prospered due to grants or capital from charities and funds that invest in companies aimed at protecting nature.

And there are questions around how much they can be scaled up.

If açaí production was expanded into many industrial-size plantations, it could start to cause exactly the same problems that people like Damien are trying to solve.

But there’s a reason the word “bioeconomy” is plastered all over the UN climate talks.

“We need to move from a world dependent on fossil fuels – that is clear,” says Ana Yang, Director of the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House.

“And if we don’t have solutions that are bio-based, we will not be able to do that,” she says.

This is by no means a magic bullet solution to the problem of how to replace fossil fuels with clean energy and use the land in a way that protects nature.

Brazil has also promised a four-fold increase in the use of biofuels, which can be controversial, by 2035. Biofuels such as ethanol are often touted as a replacement for fossil fuels, but they can lead to deforestation as demand increases for the crop to burn to make the fuel.

Some are concerned this will lead to the unsustainable extraction of timber or sugarcane to export abroad and burn, and the theft of indigenous peoples’ land.

Ms Yang says it’s essential to put safeguards like strong regulation in place.

“Not all bio-based transitions are good,” she says.

“If they lead to destruction of natural habitat or they don’t have good social practices, then it isn’t solving the original problem.”