Jabuticaba: What a Poisonous-Looking Fruit Teaches About Doing Business Abroad

I once had to explain Brazilian installments, the famous 10 times without interest, to Amazon’s leadership team, Jeff Bezos included. To which the obvious question was: if the customer pays in 10 installments, how come there is no interest? This unique Brazilian payment option is so oddly bizarre for Americans that it took the room quite some time to grasp it. At some points, people were even in denial. It was a strange meeting. I felt as if I was explaining a jabuticaba.

Installments are how Brazilians buy almost anything: a TV, a phone, a plane ticket, split into ten monthly payments with no interest. Nobody here thinks twice about it. But sitting in that room, trying to explain who actually pays for the interest, why customers expect it and why no retailer can sell without it, I realised how strange it sounds from the outside.

Installments, something obvious to Brazilians, were absolutely odd and unreal to Americans.

We Brazilians have a word for a situation or business deal so odd that it shouldn’t work, but somehow does: Jabuticaba. Something that looks absurd from the outside, somehow works, and seems to exist only in one place.

The word comes from a fruit tree, and the tree explains the idea better than any definition.

A fruit that breaks every rule

The first time you see a Jabuticaba tree, it doesn’t look right. The fruit doesn’t hang from the tips of the branches like any other fruit. It grows directly on the trunk, covering the bark as if the tree itself were covered by a plague.

The fruits are pitch black, shiny and look poisonous. And there’s a correct way to eat them that nobody explains to you: you don’t bite it, you don’t peel it and you never chew it. You squeeze it gently between your teeth until the skin pops, swallow the sweet white pulp and spit out the skin and the seed. Chew the skin and all you’ll taste is bitterness.

Get it right, and it’s one of the best fruits you’ll ever eat. Bite it wrong and all you get is bitterness.

Every instruction for eating a Jabuticaba is also a lesson about doing business in a country that isn’t yours.

It looks poisonous

Most foreigners’ first reaction to Brazil’s business environment is the same as to the fruit: this looks dangerous, stay away.

Take taxes. Brazil’s main sales tax, ICMS, is set by each of the 27 states, with different rates, rules and paperwork for the same product. In some sectors the tax isn’t even paid by the seller but collected up front from the manufacturer, on behalf of the whole chain. From the outside, it looks like a system designed to punish anyone who tries.

It is complex. But companies operate inside it every day, and there’s an entire industry of people and software that makes it work. The first impression is real, but it isn’t the whole story. What nobody will tell you is that most taxes in Brazil are heavily automated and API-driven. If you integrate properly and use the right tech, Brazilian taxes are easier to operate than those of any European country. However, no one believes at first glance that Brazilian taxes can be far better to operate than those of any European country. Not because they’re simpler (they’re still taxes, with all the complexity and craziness that comes with them) but because they’re heavily automated, and that changes everything.

Don’t bite it all at once

If you bite a Jabuticaba like an apple, you get a mouthful of bitter skin and decide you hate it.

The same happens to companies that enter a new country with a big launch: a large team, a big marketing budget, a product copied exactly from home. They meet the local complexity at full speed and conclude the market doesn’t work.

Most international expansion projects fail when companies fail to understand the nuances of the new market. Or even worse, go into denial mode and keep pushing the same marketing approach.

Companies that try to export the same business model, the same sales playbook and the same product will struggle in a new market. Not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because the market is different.

New markets often beat newcomers not because they’re hard or look poisonous, but simply because they’re different. Being different alone is enough to break any foreign business plan or go-to-market plan.

Don’t peel it, don’t chew the skin

You can’t peel a Jabuticaba, and you shouldn’t try. The skin is part of the fruit: you work around it.

Not every strange local rule needs to be fixed. Some complexity exists for good reasons you don’t understand yet; some you can simply leave to local partners. The mistake is spending your energy fighting the skin instead of getting to the pulp.

Parcelado sem juros is a good example. A foreign company can see it as an inefficiency to eliminate. Amazon Brazil fought really hard to avoid installments. It took Amazon years to finally accept that installments were a critical piece of the local strategy and a major sales driver. A Brazilian company prices it in, because customers expect it and it’s how they compare offers. Fighting it means losing the sale. The trick is learning which complexity to work with and which to ignore. Not everything strange is a problem to solve.

Never chew it

Nobody writes down “never chew the skin”. You learn it from someone who grew up with the tree.

Every market has rules like that: who you need to know, how negotiations really work, what a “yes” in a meeting actually means. None of it is in the market research.

International expansion projects are more likely to succeed if you have a local senior executive working on it, not someone from headquarters.

It’s tempting to expand to a new market using existing talent. Most companies do. However, corporations often fail to acknowledge that local hires and local partners are sometimes a better way to do business abroad. They are local, so they already know not to chew the skin. You’re not just hiring a local expert, you’re hiring the local team that will drive business locally, with insights from headquarters but with an exceptional knowledge of local pitfalls and traps.

Jabuticabas are amazing

Not every Jabuticaba is a burden. Some of them are better than what the rest of the world has.

Pix is the best example I know. Launched by Brazil’s Central Bank in 2020, it lets anyone send money instantly, at any hour, using just a phone number or an ID. It’s free for individuals and became part of daily life in Brazil faster than almost anyone predicted. It’s so powerful that it’s used in nearly 50% of all financial transactions in Brazil.

Pix is still a Jabuticaba for many countries. It’s odd; it seems too good to be true. It massively benefits merchants and shoppers. Yet it’s one of the major financial innovations of this century.

When Brazilian companies go abroad, we carry our own Jabuticabas with us. Sometimes they’re the bitter skin we need to leave behind. Sometimes they’re exactly what the rest of the world is missing.

Jabuticabas grow elsewhere too

Here’s the twist: the Jabuticaba doesn’t actually grow only in Brazil. It’s native to parts of Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina too, and people grow it in Florida, in California and in backyards around the world. It rarely travels for a simpler reason: once picked, the fruit starts to ferment within a few days.

The same is true of most “uniquely Brazilian” things. Much of what we think nobody else could understand, someone else already does. And much of what foreigners dismiss as absurd has a logic once you’re inside it. Installments looked absurd in that room at Amazon. A few years later, they were a major sales driver.

Every market has its Jabuticabas. The fruit only looks impossible until someone shows you how to eat it.