This is a podcast-style interview (Cracks Podcast) with Oso Trava and Eugenio Baeza recounting their business journey from struggling meat wholesaling to retail expansion. They describe operational problems (currency mismatch, buyers not paying, discounts for off-spec deliveries), a tactical pivot to selling cash from a trailer/box in a warehouse, then gradual diversification into other products and rapid store expansion (including opening nine stores in the year after going public). The conversation also notes broader diversification into SFM, real estate and food and references years around 2005–2007.
Questions this video answers
Nine stores
SFM, real estate, and food
2005 and 2007
Chapters
The meat we sold, we bought in dollars. We sold it in pesos and they didn't pay us. It was a terrible amount of coyotes. Right?
The trailer would arrive and they would say it didn't meet the specifications and they would give you discounts.
And, well, the margins were like that. So we decided to put a trailer box in a warehouse, a scale, a counter, and sell at the price of.
A trailer box to sell in cash, because that business was dead if we kept doing that.
And so we started selling by the.
Box and then we started selling other products and it started to take off.
But it's what I'm telling you, you find it, right? It's not that I actually took the.
Piece of the mander's helmet and said.
Um, let's open a store and we're going to have 1,000 stores in 30 years. It's not that we couldn't keep selling.
On credit and we had to find a way to keep the business going.
And that was the way.
And from there, CAR has developed.
Imagine when we went public, I presented.
The big challenge as opening nine stores the following year.
That was the challenge. Like, wow.
So you find it and you keep.
Generating it, you keep building it, and then it starts to come out again.
Something is better here and something is.
Better here and you keep doing it. What I'm saying seems really important to me, right? It seems really important to me.
For entrepreneurs who shouldn't spend five years wondering what the next unicorn is going to be.
They should get into what's coming, the bull, wherever it is. If you're a tech person, you're going to come across tech stuff. If you're a restaurant person, like this guy you recently had, you're going to.
Come across another franchise, another idea, another chef, because that's what you're into.
But the interesting thing is that as.
You grow and as your capital obviously.
Grows, there start to be many more opportunities. Many of them could take you away.
Not only from your business, but even from your purpose.
How do you decide what to buy.
And what not to buy?
Today they have SFM, real estate and food. We.
We'Re talking about 92 and 96.
Think of Universidad Bafar Systems, 2005. Well, Carnomar was already pushing this, pushing.
The consumer products area and moving forward.
Right? That was what was there at that time. 2007 came along and we said, hey, well.
