A dry-goods store in the town of partridges.

Perdigão was founded on 18 August 1934 in Videira, in the Midwest of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil. Portuguese Wikipedia, citing a 2007 study of the company by the economist Armando João Dalla Costa in the Revista de Economia Contemporânea, names its founders as the brothers Ângelo and Pedro Ponzoni and André David, Arthur, Guilherme, Abrão and Saul Brandalise. The business began as a small dry-goods store and turned to industry in 1939 with a pig slaughterhouse. English Wikipedia’s article on BRF, the company Perdigão later became, gives the same founding date.

The name comes from the place. Videira was once called Vila das Perdizes e Vitória; Portuguese Wikipedia, citing the magazine Superinteressante in January 2009, says the company’s symbol derives from that origin, perdigão being another word for perdiz, the partridge.

The company’s own timeline picks out its early landmarks. It says the Salsicha Perdigão sausage, which it calls one of the brand’s icons, was launched in 1940, and that in 1975 it made its first export, to Saudi Arabia, describing itself as one of the Brazilian pioneers in poultry exports. Portuguese Wikipedia records that the company was listed on the stock exchange from 1980 and, citing Nielsen figures from 2006, gives its main segments as processed meats such as sausages, hams and mortadella, frozen meats such as burgers and meatballs, and ready-made pasta dishes.

Chester, Mortadela Ouro and a heart.

The brand’s most talked-about product is a bird. Chester is a registered trademark for a line of chicken with a larger share of breast and thigh; Portuguese Wikipedia says the line was developed in the United States from a Scottish line and brought to Brazil in 1979 as an alternative to the Christmas turkey, and the company dates the launch of Chester Perdigão to 1982. Its secrecy became a story of its own: The New York Times asked in October 2016 what, exactly, a Chester is, and for the product’s 40th anniversary in December 2020 the company released photographs of the live bird, CNN Brasil reported.

The company’s timeline lists the rest of the range as it grew: Big Chicken in 1996, frozen pizza in 1998, the start of advertising for its Mortadela Ouro in 2000, the Meu Menu single-portion ready meals of pasta, polenta and escondidinho in 2010, and the Perdigão Na Brasa sub-brand for the grill in 2011. In 2023, the company says, Mortadela Ouro set a Guinness World Records title for the largest metre-long mortadella sandwich.

Its identity history is short and dated. The company says Perdigão adopted its first heart-shaped logo in 2006, introduced a new brand positioning in 2019 and, for its 90th anniversary in 2024, launched a new logo and new packaging. Its slogan is “O sabor de comer juntos” — “the taste of eating together” — and it says the heart is in the brand “because it is with the heart that everything is thought out and made.” It also calls Perdigão the most chosen food brand in Brazil, citing Kantar for 2020; that ranking is the company’s own citation.

Brazilian food, documented.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and all of them come from Brazil: Sadia, Perdigão, Seara, Aurora, Bauducco, Marilan and Itambé. Brazilian food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to cooperatives and names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood market to a national supermarket chain.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factories or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From family firm to a brand of MBRF.

The founding families did not keep control. Portuguese Wikipedia says that from 1994 Perdigão was controlled by a pool of pension funds led by Previ, the fund of Banco do Brasil employees, with fully professional management; the same encyclopedia’s article on Sadia adds that Perdigão, then close to bankruptcy, had been offered to Sadia, which declined. In October 2000 Estadão reported its American Depositary Receipts’ debut in New York. It then bought widely, Portuguese Wikipedia records with dated press citations: the Batavo business in stages from 2000 to 2007, the last stake from Parmalat; the Doriana, Claybom and Delicata margarines from Unilever in June 2007, as Folha de S.Paulo reported; and Eleva Alimentos, owner of Avipal and Elegê, in October 2007.

In May 2009 Perdigão and Sadia agreed to merge, and Perdigão’s company renamed itself BRF – Brasil Foods, later BRF S.A.; Perdigão became a brand. English Wikipedia says that, as agreed with CADE, Brazil’s competition authority, during the merger, Perdigão stayed out of some key categories, including ham and smoked sausage, for three years, returning in 2015. In September 2014 BRF sold its dairy business, including Batavo and Elegê, to Lactalis, O Globo reported. In March 2017 Brazil’s Federal Police launched Operation Weak Flesh, which investigated meat processors including BRF, owner of Perdigão and Sadia, according to English Wikipedia. In 2025 Marfrig, already BRF’s majority shareholder, merged the two companies into MBRF Global Foods Company, based in São Paulo, after CADE approval in September 2025.

On where it is made, Portuguese Wikipedia, describing the company before the merger, lists 16 meat plants in Santa Catarina, Paraná, Goiás, Mato Grosso and Rio Grande do Sul; BRF, English Wikipedia says, runs about 50 production facilities in eight countries.

For a design guide, Perdigão shows how a brand can draw its emblem from a town’s old name and rebuild its look around a heart. Compare Sadia, its rival turned stablemate, and Aurora Alimentos, another Santa Catarina food brand. For this guide we use a deep blue, a pale mist and a red with a friendly sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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