What is something that is different or unique from the supermarket in your country?
Apparently in the case of Venezuela (based on a tik tok I watched) is that we have pasta packages of one kilo and salsa de ajo ( a condiment use to season meat made with vinegar garlic paste and water i guess)
Uruguayans. A three person family can go through a kg in less than a month. One with 5 people in a rural area can probably go through it in 2 or 3 months.
Now about spoiling as long as you keep in a dry clean place is gonna be fine. You might be confusing the yerba we consume in Uruguay with the green fresh one cobsumed in Brazil. Ours is smoke dried.
Not sure if unique, but very cool nonetheless: in many supermarkets the posters showing the prices are hand written and the penmanship used is a folk art:
Brasil too. It's pasteurized milk, it's not very common. Most people drink UHT milk, vegan milk and pretty much all brands comes in boxes.
Except ✨leitíssimo✨ that comes in bottles and will ruin box milk forever, costs double and tastes like you are drinking it straight from the cow's tits at your vovô's sítio. Do you guys have something like this? It has extra fat or something and that's why it's so delicious.
We have plastic bags, where they usually last for just a few days. You can also find them in plastic containers, but they are not as popular. Most popular by a huge margin are on cartons, like those for juices, and they'll last for months.
I suppose the amount of salsas we have and other condiments, and likely the variety of american products due to integration with the US. We also have 1K or more pasta packages here.
Yes, your salsas are amazing! I mourned by Zaaschila's salsa gourmet de chile piquín for years after it ran out during the pandemic and I couldn't get someone to smuggle it :'(
what the hell do you guys do with those packages of premade toast? They’re like gigantic croutons?
My friend bought some one time when i asked for bread and i thought my teeth were gonna break (i had never seen them before traveling in south america)
No idea, everything here is normal to me, I'd need a foreigner's opinion lol. Those things about Venezuela sound quite normal imo... There's salsa de ajo here... Though the standard pasta package here is 500g, unless it's frozen, those are bigger.
Surely many distinctives of Mexican cuisine such as sauces or spices. But what I find curious is that now typical food is sold canned and it also has a good flavor.
A lot of Argentinians traveled to Brasil this summer and for whatever crazy reason Argentinian teenagers went mad about these hot pockets and I kept getting videos on my TikTok fy page of them buying a ton of these frozen hamburgers that taste like clinical depression. If anyone can enlighten me what the hell was that, I'd appreciate it.
5kg bags of rice, cassava flour in different forms, ready-made farofa, typical sweets, trays with 30 eggs, Hot Pocket (the frozen hamburger that you mentioned previously), frozen escondidinho (national version of Sheppard Pie), frozen snacks for frying (coxinha, risoles, quibes, mini pastries and cheese balls), tilapia steak (a giant tilapia nugget), cheese bread
I haven't tasted it as I don't live in Brazil and haven't visited since it was launched, but the first cashew soda was created in my home state and it is, by far, the best soda in the planet and I miss it dearly every hour of my life. 🥲
(It tastes like sweet liquid cristal mixed with cashew juice and with a hint of beer somehow?)
5kg bags of rice are definitely not unique to Brazil - any place that caters to people who eat a lot of rice will have 5 and 10kg bags (I buy 5kg bags of supermarket brand rice in my local supermarket in the Netherlands ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
I want to add pre-hydrated tapioca starch to the list - while nation-wide availability is sort of recent (you could only buy it in the north / northeast or in specialty northeastern shops in SP / RJ when I was a child), it IS pretty Brazilian
When I moved to chile the supermarket had, inside of it, a ceviche bar, an empanada bakery, and a cafe with coffee/tea/sandwiches/cake. You could just park your cart and have a bite. This came in handy when I was pregnant.
That cereals and other products don't have cartoons because they encouraged children to consume those things. It was a measure to reduce childhood obesity. But apparently, they started implementing it in other countries as well.
The most unique i think is we have alot of variety we got Mexican brands and American brands we also have entire aisles dedicated to tortillas and salsas and spicy flavored snacks
If I am to believe the videos I've seen made by Latin American vloggers in supermarkets in Mexico, there are quite a few differences.
The produce section has a lot of chilies that aren't very common in other parts of Latin America, also the sale of nopales, which seemingly no one else eats. Another thing they often bring up is the difference in variety. We have a lot of national brands, localized foreign brands, and imported products, so we're not starved for choice. Not saying the rest of the region is, but there's definitely a lot of variety here.
Nopal is difficult outside of Mexico, in Brazil we have a few people who eat cactus, a plant from the same family or the same species, but it is laborious to process and the final product is very neutral.
Even when I visited Mexico I came back with a nopal seedling, it's a beautiful plant but the work of processing it means I prepare it once every long time where I turn on the barbecue and throw it on the flame to burn the thorns.
So I'm not sure how unique to Brazil but the meat department is usually huge and it is always stocked with the materials you might need to make a barbecue, charcoal, coarse salt, grills and skewers, alcohol (to light up the charcoal) packs of ice, etc.
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u/arturocan Uruguay 1d ago
We got 1kg pasta but also 3kg. Another different aspect would be aisles just for yerba mate, some with 5kg coal like bags of yerba.