Thursday was our last full day in Piracicaba, São Paulo.  We woke up bright and early to take a tour of Raízen Group Sugar Mill, a Brazilian subsidiary of Shell and Cozan.  Our hostess, Fatima, gave us a warm welcome and was happy to answer any of our questions about Raízen and the sugarcane industry as a whole. We began our tour by watching a video that briefly explained the history of Raízen and also the scale of the sugarcane industry, including the processes sugarcane must undergo to become sugar, ethanol, or biodiesel. 

On Wednesday, May 15th 2013 the IBIP group traveled to Caterpillar (CAT), followed by Case New Holland (CNH), and ended the day with the University of Sao Paulo (USP) ESALQ Junior Enterprise program. 

We got off to an early start this morning, checking out of our Avenida Paulista hotel a little after 7am.  Bunge was our first stop of the day on the northern part of São Paulo.  We had visited the Bunge research facility in Bradley, Illinois back in April so this was really our first opportunity to compare a United States agribusiness facility to a Brazilian one. 

Hi Everyone - We're safe and sound in Sao Paulo, and we had a successful start to our trip. We learned a lot today from Rabobank, UNICA, and Abiove. We also hosted a wonderful joint College of ACES and College of Business Alumni Reception in our hotel. Many Brazilian alums attended, and it was a huge success. We're experiencing slow internet connection and will hopefully be able to upload the blog and photos when we arrive in Piracicaba tomorrow evening. Stay tuned, but know that we are well!  Thanks for the patience.

We started the day with breakfast together at the hotel in Sao Paulo, then took an hour drive (within the vast city) over to Rabobank, which is one of the highest rated private banks in the world. Rabobank is also one of the most well-known and largest food and agricultural-focused lending institutions in the world.  

On the first day of our trip we met in Chicago to start our journey to travel to the most populous city in South America: Sao Paulo!  After a 10 hour flight, where one of our flight attendants fell in the aisle (due to an IBIP student's backpack in the way) while serving us breakfast, we finally arrived. After meeting with our travel guides, Felipe, Daniel, and Brenda of Campus Brasil, we took a bus to the hotel. They shared with us that the population in the Sao Paulo (+ surrounding metropolitan area) is 20 million people, which makes it the 7th largest city in the world.