🛒 Supermarkets

Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.

Who is the largest private employer in Brazil?

You might suspect meatpacking giant JBS, or maybe national champion Embraer. But you’d be wrong—for years now, the answer has actually been Grupo Carrefour Brasil, the local subsidiary of the French multinational grocery store chain of the same name.

Including everyone inside the wholly-owned Atacadão wholesale network, Carrefour counts over 150K employees nationwide. Marcel Fournier, its founder, gambled everything on Carrefour’s first hypermarket, famously declaring before opening day, “Tomorrow, either I’m rich or I’m ruined.”

Now, Carrefour may sign a lot of paychecks, but further north it’s outpaced by a different type of retailer. FEMSA, the world's largest bottler of Coca-Cola, is also Mexico’s top private employer. Last year, it counted over $40B in sales, while across its factories and OXXO locations it counted over 350K employees.

Today, OXXO operates at hyper speed, opening 4+ new stores per day in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru last year. In terms of sales, FEMSA is second only to another Latin American retailer.

We dove a bit deeper into OXXO (including its impressive fintech arm) last year for the curious.

Why is Walmart so dominant in the region’s retail market?

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