Israel Approved Brazilian Chicken Imports in February. Last Week the Government Reversed Course — the Market Still Has Zero Foreign Competitors

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-08-20 · 5 min read

47% — Gap between the cheapest and priciest fresh chicken breast we found across chains in our August 20, 2026 price scan — ₪42.9/kg to ₪62.9/kg — in a market that, four days earlier, lost its one shot at foreign competition

Nearly three weeks ago we wrote that Israel's chicken market has never once faced a foreign competitor, and that whole chicken breast is up 42% since 2020 in a market with nobody to keep prices honest. At the time, one company was closer than anyone in Israeli history to changing that. On August 16, the government made sure it wouldn't.

The approval that was supposed to change things

In February 2026, Israel's then-chief veterinary officer, Dr. Tamir Goshen, approved a Brazilian poultry plant to export chicken to Israel — the first foreign facility ever cleared to do so, with the approval set to take effect around mid-June. It went ahead over the objection of the Ministry of Agriculture's own leadership, the Broiler (Lul) Council and the growers' organizations themselves, according to the Israel Poultry Growers Organization, which opposed the approval from the outset and pushed to have it cancelled. The beneficiary was Baldi, a meat importer that floated on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 2024 and had already sunk roughly ₪21 million into a kosher-certified production line at the Brazilian plant, betting the Brazil route would become a central growth engine.

Six months later, a reversal

On August 16, 2026, at 19:03, Dr. Sergio Dolev, the ministry's acting head of veterinary services, sent Baldi a letter titled "cancellation of Brazil's approval to export chicken to Israel." He removed the plant from the list of facilities cleared to import meat into Israel — reversing his own predecessor's decision — and, for now, closed the door on Brazil as an approved poultry source entirely, according to Calcalist and Globes. The Ministry's stated reason: a re-examination found that the actual production line and Brazil's capacity to supervise it needed to be verified against Israeli standards before the approval could stand, framed as "professional considerations and responsibility for public health and animal welfare."

There's an irony worth noting in a public-health rationale: court documents reported by TheMarker in a separate proceeding over the same import fight show that it's domestic Israeli chicken, not Brazilian, that has struggled to meet the standards required to export abroad — the opposite of the "our chicken is safer" argument growers have made publicly.

The timing isn't happening in a vacuum. Per Ynet, the European Union has separately announced it will fully ban Brazilian poultry imports starting in September, citing its own doubts about compliance with Western sanitation and inspection standards — a data point that complicates the simple story of local growers protecting their turf, whatever else was also going on. Ynet also reports something worth being precise about: the frozen chicken this approval covered was intended mainly for institutional buyers — caterers, event halls, restaurants and hospitals — not the fresh chicken most Israeli households actually buy at the supermarket.

Baldi calls foul, the kosher world applauds

Baldi says the reversal was procedurally unfair — made, in the company's words, without giving it a chance to respond, in breach of the duty to hold a hearing — and says it intends to "promptly pursue the legal means available to it" to challenge and overturn the decision, per Calcalist, without yet naming which court. The stakes are real: Baldi had projected the Brazil route would lift annual revenue by 10%-15%, on the order of ₪300-400 million, inside a company valued around ₪3 billion by its own projections and carrying a market cap of roughly ₪2.1 billion, per Globes. The stock has also taken a separate hit this month, falling about 9.5% in a day, after Shufersal announced it would start importing frozen meat from South America independently and sell it through its own butcher counters — Baldi is one of Shufersal's meat suppliers, so that move cuts Baldi out as middleman on a second front entirely.

Not everyone is upset. Per Kikar HaShabbat, religious authorities welcomed the pause, arguing that certifying slaughter overseen from Israel but carried out abroad raises kashrut complexities that "cannot be rushed" and require scrutiny of both the "veterinary-hygienic" and the "halakhic" sides before any import proceeds.

What our own prices still show

The reversal doesn't change what Superclear's own index already shows: a market nobody has ever had to compete in isn't a cheap one. Because fresh chicken is sold loose rather than under a single uniform barcode, we can't compare one identical product across every chain — but checking the fresh chicken breast SKUs each chain does report, our scan on August 20, 2026 found prices from ₪42.9/kg under Shufersal's own listing and ₪44.9/kg at Mishnat Yosef, up to ₪52.9-62.9/kg at Super Yuda and Fresh Market — a 47% gap between the cheapest and priciest chain we could check, for the same basic cut, on the very same day Israel's only pending foreign supplier remained locked out. That's on top of the trend regulators themselves have already put on the record: whole chicken breast up 42.2% since 2020 to about ₪39.4/kg, sliced breast up 25% to ₪39.9/kg, and thighs up 42% to ₪27.7/kg, according to Shufersal Deal data cited in the court documents behind the Supreme Court's July 28 ruling giving the Chief Rabbinate 120 days to decide on kosher-certifying chicken imports at all — a separate, still-open track that this reversal doesn't touch.

The bottom line

Even if this approval had survived, it was never going to put a Brazilian breast next to an Israeli one on a supermarket shelf — the frozen product it covered was headed mostly to restaurant kitchens and hospital caterers, not your cart. But it was the closest anything has come, in the market's entire history, to a foreign competitor of any kind. Six months after it was granted, that crack got sealed back up. The Rabbinate's clock, separately, is still running toward late November. Until something on one of these tracks actually lands product in Israel, the number that matters is the one we can check ourselves: a 47% spread between chains selling the same basic product to a captive market, with nobody from outside allowed to undercut any of them.

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