Batatec 2026: Brazil's biggest sweet-potato fair, in a city where agro is 0.5% of GDP
Presidente Prudente barely grows any sweet potato — the crop is in the surrounding towns. The city is a services showcase and the media capital of the Oeste Paulista. It's from that crossing that Brazil's largest sweet-potato tech fair is born. How a brand talks to this market — from field to table.
Presidente Prudente is a city of asphalt, colleges and shopping malls — agro accounts for a mere 0.5% of its GDP. And yet, from July 23 to 26, it hosts Brazil’s largest sweet-potato tech fair: Batatec, in its 7th edition, at the IBC Centro de Eventos. The crop isn’t in the city; it’s in the surroundings, in the hands of some 180 producers of the red soils of the Oeste Paulista. Prudente is the showcase — the place where the sweet potato becomes business, technology and table.
Now imagine you’re a machinery, inputs, credit or food brand and you want to reach the audience that walks through. The market’s reflex treats Prudente as “just another mid-sized inland city.” The data says otherwise: Prudente is the media capital of the Oeste Paulista — it concentrates most of the regional audience, and one well-made buy here lights up the whole region at once. Whoever reads the territory doesn’t buy a city; they buy the market that commands a piece of the map.
2026
CAPITAL
The field-to-table fair
Batatec grew fast: in seven editions, it multiplied its public by six and became Brazil’s largest sweet-potato fair — a technical, chain fair, not a rodeo. The 2026 theme, “Inovação e Novos Subprodutos” (Innovation and New Byproducts), sums up the ambition: to turn the humble root into technology and value. The program stacks the Arena do Conhecimento (new cultivars and management), the Corrida Batatec, specialized gastronomy, machinery and input exhibitions, and the launch of a new sweet-potato byproduct.
And the “new byproduct” is no detail. Prudente sits at the center of a frontier that could redefine the chain: sweet-potato ethanol — the root becoming fuel —, alongside cultivars like the IAC one “with 65 times more beta-carotene” and semi-mechanized planting. The region’s sweet-potato Geographic Indication is in the final stage of recognition. It’s a fair that doesn’t just celebrate the harvest; it bets on what the sweet potato can still become.
And the fair is big: the 6th edition gathered more than 70 exhibitors — and the 2026 one lines up machinery, vehicle and credit heavyweights alongside the ten micro and small companies subsidized by Sebrae-SP. Among the big names:
Sebrae-SP · small business · 10 stands
Welcome to the paradox: the city that doesn't plant
Here’s the inversion that makes Prudente a case of territorial intelligence. The city is the regional services capital of the Oeste Paulista — commerce, health, education, where the people of dozens of smaller towns converge. Agro weighs only 0.5% of its GDP because the sweet-potato crop is in the surroundings, in the towns and farms around it. Prudente doesn’t harvest; it concentrates: it’s where the surrounding output becomes business, where the producer comes to buy machinery, close credit and learn technique, and where the sweet potato meets the urban consumer — the fair’s other audience.
Because Batatec speaks to two audiences at once. On one side, the agro B2B: the producer, the technician, the input dealer, who decides by technology and productivity. On the other, the gastronomy B2C: the urban family that goes to the fair to eat, discover a recipe and take the root home — the “field to table” that names the vocation. Two messages, two tones, one market. And it’s that dual nature that makes the fair so interesting for a brand: you can talk to who produces and who consumes in the same place.
And this market’s money is big: Presidente Prudente moves R$ 3.6 billion per month in Pix received, with 162,000 people on the receiving end. It’s an economy of scale, of a hub city — not that of an agricultural hamlet.
Who walks the fair
Batatec’s audience is the whole Oeste Paulista in miniature. The Trama that NexOS generated for Presidente Prudente calls the city “Varanda Quente do Oeste” (the Hot Porch of the West): the layover city where the heat presses down, the wind lifts red dust, and the people of the surroundings come to sort out life — to study, shop, get treated — and then go back to the farm or the smaller towns. It’s people who split their time between work, family, church and study, who hit the road to visit relatives and come home from the job at dusk in the heat that gives no truce.
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How a brand talks to the community of the West
Here’s the point that separates reading the territory from reading only the spreadsheet. Prudente isn’t “just another mid-sized city” — it’s the region’s media hub: 18 radio stations, local TV and strong regional portals — the traditional O Imparcial and the Diário de Prudente up front —, with an inventory that concentrates most of the Oeste Paulista’s programmatic media. Buying media in Prudente is buying the region: one market, many cities reached.
And radio, here, is precision territory. The city has strong stations whose protected field — the exact ANATEL coverage contour — covers Prudente and the surrounding municipal grid. We don’t say “reaches X municipalities,” we say people: Rede Aleluia 103.7 reaches 346,573 people; Band 97.1, 343,463; Rádio 99.9, 342,294; Nativa 98.5, 289,257. They’re irregular, real shapes — the exact drawing of where each station speaks:
Put the pieces together and a brand’s plan for Batatec builds in two layers, for the two audiences. For the agro B2B: radio (strong among drivers and service workers, morning and dusk on the road), geo programmatic fencing the IBC and the surrounding rural grid, and technical content on the regional portals. For the gastronomy B2C: local influencers on Instagram, activation at the fair and the “field to table” that becomes a shared recipe. And the sound car, OOH at the roundabouts and flyering at colleges and clinics cover whoever moves through the city every day. All measured by consumption intensity, never by empty “impressions.”
All of this — the radios, the portals, the geo programmatic — is what NexOS organizes and makes buyable in one stroke through the Alright Network, the curation of the largest local and regional media inventory in Brazil. In a regional capital like Prudente, plugging the outlets into the Network means buying the whole Oeste Paulista with neighborhood precision.
This is where the method comes in. The NexOS Planner methodology starts from a simple rule — territory first, platform second. In Prudente, “territory first” means understanding that the city isn’t the target — it’s the command center of an entire region —, and that the fair has two audiences that call for two plans. And the tone speaks like people of the West: one foot inland and one in the big city, “hard-working folk,” “the daily grind” — no cosmopolitan excess, with concrete examples of who hits the road and comes home from the job.
Varanda Quente do Oeste
NexOS territorial intelligence has a name for Presidente Prudente: Varanda Quente do Oeste — the Hot Porch of the West. It’s the layover city of the Oeste Paulista — the open porch where the surroundings come to sort out life and then go back to the farm. It’s where the sweet potato of the red soils meets the asphalt, the college and the table; where the farm producer and the apartment consumer cross paths at the same fair; and where one city’s media reaches dozens of others. Batatec is the moment that porch fills up — with machinery, root, recipe and business.
And here’s the lesson NexOS pursues in every territory: the agro that barely shows up in Prudente’s GDP moves, from outside it, a fair that is the largest in the country in its crop. What looks like a contradiction — services city, root fair — is, at bottom, the logic of the hub: the city doesn’t plant, it concentrates. Talking to this market isn’t choosing between field and city; it’s understanding that, here, the two meet on the porch. And whoever reads that before opening the spreadsheet arrives at Batatec with the right plan for both audiences — while the competitor still treats Prudente as just another mid-sized city.
Sources: Batatec — official site and @batatecoficial; sector context via IAC/Agência SP and regional press. Media, audience, Pix (Central Bank) and symbolic-layer data (“Varanda Quente do Oeste” — NexOS municipal Trama): NexOS/Tramas (BigQuery); radio coverage derived from the ANATEL base. Territorial mesh: IBGE 2022. Media metric: intensity = bid requests ÷ cookies. Sector production and rankings are public data (IBGE/Embrapa). Sweet potato: Rio Grande do Sul is the top national producer, São Paulo second — Presidente Prudente hosts the country’s largest fair.