A family biscuit factory in Rio’s north zone.

Piraquê is a biscuit and pasta brand from the north zone of Rio de Janeiro. Forbes Brasil reported in February 2018 that Celso Colombo founded the company in 1950; IstoÉ Dinheiro, in a 2007 profile, gave the founding year as 1952, so the sources differ. The company’s own timeline says that construction of its factory began in Madureira in 1950 and that the biscuit factory opened in 1953, starting with savoury lines. Portuguese Wikipedia places the factory in the neighbouring district of Turiaçu, and M. Dias Branco, the brand’s owner today, uses both names for its Rio unit on different pages of its websites.

The name comes from Tupi, Portuguese Wikipedia says, joining pirá, “fish,” and iké, “to enter.” The same source gives the company’s legal name as Indústria de Produtos Alimentícios Piraquê S/A.

According to the company timeline, pasta followed in 1957, with spaghetti and talharim; the guava roll, the roladinho de goiaba, arrived in 1966 and is described by the company as one of its best sellers; and a line of margarines appeared in 1980. In the same year, the timeline says, Piraquê opened its own printing works for its biscuit and pasta packaging. A noodle line called Lámen followed in 2007.

The business stayed with the Colombo family for more than six decades. In 2007 IstoÉ Dinheiro described Piraquê as an exception in a Brazilian biscuit trade where names such as Tostines and Aimoré had passed to multinationals: it had turned down offers. The magazine quoted the founder’s son Celso Colombo Filho, then commercial director, as saying the company made everything from the fat to the packaging, and reported that most of its sales were in Rio de Janeiro state, with plans to expand into São Paulo state. Forbes Brasil reported in 2018 that ownership had passed to the founder’s four sons and their heirs.

Packaging credited to Lygia Pape.

Piraquê’s packaging is the best-documented part of its design story. Portuguese Wikipedia, citing a 2013 paper by Cristina Grafanassi Tranjan and Maria Clara Amado Martins in Graphica, published in Florianópolis by the Federal University of Santa Catarina, credits the artist Lygia Pape with creating the packaging for the brand’s biscuits. It says the identity, created in the 1960s, became an icon of Brazilian design, and that the defining feature of the packs was the repetition of graphic elements, which became known nationally and associated with the brand.

Pape belonged to the same generation as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, and was part of Brazil’s Concrete art movement and the Neo-Concrete movement formalised in 1959, the food-culture site Comes noted in a short piece in 2021. It called her work for Piraquê a landmark in the relationship between art and design in Brazil.

The company has described the packs in similar terms. A brand page on its website, archived in 2021, said the packaging created in the 1960s, innovative in its prints and materials, had changed little since, and credited its use of space and strong geometry with stirring curiosity in newcomers and nostalgia in people who grew up with it. The company’s timeline records a modernised logo in 2009 and the start of a redesign of all its packaging that year.

After the family sale, the old designs moved back to the front. O Globo reported in September 2020 that Piraquê was launching products inspired by the visual identity created by Lygia Pape, drawing on classic packs such as the one known as the “biscoito da vaquinha,” to win customers outside Rio and higher-income shoppers.

Food and drink brands of Argentina and Brazil.

The seven brands in this group are all food and drink brands, and all of them come from Argentina or Brazil: Quilmes, SanCor, La Serenísima, Terrabusi, Mantecol, Fargo and Piraquê. Food and drink brands in these two countries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink 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 factory 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 products are 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 has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Colombo family to M. Dias Branco.

The family era ended in 2018. Portuguese Wikipedia dates M. Dias Branco’s purchase of Piraquê to 29 January 2018 and says Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, approved it on 19 March 2018. M. Dias Branco traces its own start to a business founded by Manoel Dias Branco in Ceará in 1936 and is based in Eusébio, Ceará; its brands include Vitarella, Adria, Fortaleza and Richester, and Portuguese Wikipedia describes Piraquê as a premium brand within that range.

M. Dias Branco says the purchase brought a brand active in pasta, crackers, cookies and snacks, “with two manufacturing plants,” reinforcing its presence in Brazil’s Southeast. Its list of units includes a Rio de Janeiro unit in Turiaçu, dated 1953, making pasta and biscuits; a unit at Queimados, in Rio de Janeiro state, dated 2016, making biscuits and potato snacks; and a special-fats plant in Turiaçu. Its investor-relations site lists the Rio biscuit and pasta factory and a shortening factory under Madureira. The trade site MilkPoint likewise reported in August 2018 that Piraquê had two factories, in Madureira and Queimados.

Today’s range, as listed on piraque.com.br, takes in crackers such as Água e Sal and Cream Cracker, the Leite Maltado biscuits, wafers, cookies and Maizena biscuits, savoury snacks and pasta, under the slogan “A receita é ser original” — “the recipe is to be original.”

For a design guide, Piraquê shows how packaging credited to an artist in the 1960s can be brought back by a new owner more than half a century later. Compare Garoto, another Brazilian food brand that passed from its founding family to a larger group, and Cacau Show. For this guide we use a guava red, a cracker yellow and an ink blue with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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