Catupiry Brand Guidelines: A 1911 Lambari Requeijão Named From the Tupi for “Excellent”

An Italian couple and a small Minas Gerais factory.

Catupiry began in Minas Gerais, not in São Paulo. Portuguese Wikipedia says the Italian immigrant couple Mário and Isaíra Rosa Silvestrini started production in a small factory in Lambari in November 1911. English Wikipedia credits Mario Silvestrini with developing the product in the state that year, and the company’s international website gives the same month and town for the start of Laticínios Catupiry, which it describes as a family recipe turned into a business. Portuguese Wikipedia says the couple’s first recipe was called “cremelino” and was first sold in São Lourenço, another Minas Gerais town, where their factory had moved.

The name comes from the Old Tupi language. Portuguese Wikipedia traces it to katupyryb, built from the words for “good” and “very,” so literally “very good,” and glosses it as “excellent”; English Wikipedia also gives the meaning as “excellent.” On its own website the company writes the brand in capitals with a registered-trademark sign, CATUPIRY®.

The early product travelled in a distinctive way. Each soft cheese, the company says, was wrapped in cellophane and placed by hand in a small round wooden box, and Portuguese Wikipedia adds that the boxes were packed into wooden crates and sent to grocers. It says the round lidded box, made one at a time from a thin sheet of wood, stayed in use from the 1920s until the 1980s.

Recognition followed within a decade. In 1922, Portuguese Wikipedia says, the company received a gold medal at an international food exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, and the Larousse cheese dictionary Les Fromages described its product as “the requeijão of Brazil.” The move to São Paulo came in stages: a Catupiry factory opened in the city’s Barra Funda district in 1934, and in 1949 the headquarters moved to São Paulo as well, according to Portuguese Wikipedia.

A creamy requeijão, a wooden box and a shop in an old factory.

Catupiry is a requeijão, a Brazilian creamy dairy spread. English Wikipedia describes it as a soft, mild-tasting cheese that is spread on toast, crackers and bread buns or used in cooking, and as a common filling in Brazilian dishes such as pizzas, coxinhas, pães de queijo and pastéis. Portuguese Wikipedia notes that although Catupiry is a registered trademark, the word has informally come to mean a denser type of creamy requeijão, usually sold in bisnagas, the soft tubes used in kitchens. The brand also makes a firmer requeijão that can be cut, sold in small round boxes, Portuguese Wikipedia says.

Packaging is the clearest thread in the brand’s look. Portuguese Wikipedia says plastic replaced the wooden box in the 1990s, when the bisnagas appeared alongside buckets sold to pizzerias. The format stayed round when the material changed, from the wooden box to the plastic tub the company sells today.

The current range on catupiry.com.br is grouped under names such as Catupiry Original, Requeijão Cremoso, Pop Cheese and pão de queijo, with a separate food-service line of requeijão, cheeses and savoury snacks for professional kitchens. In June 2026, Mercado & Consumo quoted the company’s executive director describing a portfolio of more than 130 products.

The brand also has a shop of its own. In 2002, Portuguese Wikipedia says, the first Delícias Catupiry store opened in the building of the brand’s old factory in São Paulo’s Bom Retiro district, selling savoury snacks, pasta, sweets and lunch dishes made with Catupiry products. In 2018, to mark the brand’s 107th year, it reopened as the Empório Catupiry, with more than 200 product lines, many of them launched the year before. The company’s website still gives the Empório a page of its own.

Where the product is made is documented in general terms. Portuguese and English Wikipedia both list four factories: two in the state of São Paulo, at Bebedouro and Santa Fé do Sul, one at Doverlândia in Goiás and one at Santa Vitória in Minas Gerais. Portuguese Wikipedia adds that the original Catupiry is made at Bebedouro, in the interior of São Paulo state.

How Latin American dairy, coffee and pantry brands present themselves.

The food brands in this group sit on supermarket shelves across Brazil, Colombia and Argentina: milk, cheese, biscuits, coffee, sauces and other pantry staples bought week after week. Their identities are built for that setting. Cartons, tins, jars and packets carry the brand name in large type, named ranges sit under one master brand, and television campaigns often put a well-known face beside the pack, as Piracanjuba did with the singer Ivete Sangalo, according to the O Povo advertising column in 2020.

Many of these names began as small regional firms and took the name of a town, a region or a family. Piracanjuba is named after the Goiás town where it began as a butter maker in 1955, and that town’s name comes from a Tupi-Guarani word for a fish of the cerrado. A single company can also own several brands at once, some built from scratch and some bought in, as Grupo Piracanjuba does with Piracanjuba, LeitBom and Emana, according to Exame and the company.

Ownership takes several forms. Some brands belong to family-owned companies that do not publish accounts; others belong to listed food groups or to multinationals; and brands also move between owners through purchases, licences and court-supervised sales. Valor Econômico reported in 2019 that Nestlé licensed its Ninho and Molico milk brands to the company behind Piracanjuba, and Globo Rural reported in 2015 that Italac’s owner bought the Nilza brand after its former company’s bankruptcy.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it today, where it makes its products and how its range and campaigns are presented. Ownership changes are given with their dates, and anything that rests only on a company’s own corporate pages is attributed to the company.

Six heir families and a deal in Paraná.

Catupiry has stayed in the founders’ families. Portuguese and English Wikipedia both say it is managed by six families, all heirs of the Silvestrinis, and that its products are sold in five countries, including the United States, Canada and Japan. Its home page dates the business back more than 113 years, to the Lambari start.

In June 2026 the company announced the purchase of the Brazilian operations of Leprino Foods, a cheese maker based in Denver, Colorado, which ran through a business called Lactojara Laticínios. CNN Brasil and Mercado & Consumo reported on 10 June that the value was not disclosed and that completion depended on approval from Brazil’s competition authority, Cade. A StoneX market analyst quoted in the same report placed the Leprino operation in the dairy state of Paraná. In August 2026, SuperVarejo reported that Cade had approved the deal and that Catupiry was moving to complete it and integrate the operations. The purchase was agreed in June 2026; not completed at the time of writing.

The brand’s visual story rests on things the sources describe rather than on a published style guide: a Tupi name meaning “excellent,” a soft cheese wrapped in cellophane, a round lidded box first made of thin wood and later of plastic, and a name that cooks use for a style of requeijão. No official typeface or brand colours are documented in the sources used here, so the tones in this guide are chosen for it.

For a design guide, Catupiry shows how a package shape and a borrowed Tupi word can carry a dairy brand from a small Minas Gerais factory to a family group with four plants. Compare Tirolez, another Brazilian cheese maker, and Piracanjuba, a dairy brand from Goiás. For this guide we use a deep blue, a pinewood tan and a requeijão cream with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Catupiry’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.