Tirolez Brand Guidelines: The Cheese Maker the Hegg Brothers Started in Tiros in 1980

Two brothers and a six-person dairy.

Tirolez is a Brazilian cheese company that began in Tiros, a small town in Minas Gerais. In 1980 two brothers, Cícero and Carlos Hegg, bought the dairy Laticínios Franco, a business with six employees that made a cheese sold as Mineirão, according to the retail-trade publication Mercado&Consumo, writing in August 2019; the business took the name Tirolez in 1981, the same report says. Globo Rural, reporting in October 2025, likewise dated the company’s founding to Tiros in 1980 and credited it to the Hegg brothers. The start was difficult: a month after the purchase, Mercado&Consumo reported, the new owners faced a crisis over government-fixed milk prices that lasted through the business’s first year.

The family firm grew into a group of plants. By 2019, Mercado&Consumo reported, it had eight business units in Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Santa Catarina; in October 2019 the same publication counted about 1,600 employees and six production units as the company neared its 40th year. In March 2024 Globo Rural described Tirolez as a family company founded 43 years earlier that made cheeses, requeijão and cheese creams, and named some of its plants: in Tiros, a unit for brie and camembert and a modernised plant for gorgonzola and blue cheese; and at Lins, in São Paulo state, a requeijão line that had been extended and automated.

The founders stepped back from daily management in 2024. Marcel de Barros, who had spent 24 years at Nestlé in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, latterly as its vice-president for dairy and culinary products in Brazil, became chief executive in January 2024, and Cícero and Carlos Hegg moved to the company’s advisory board, concentrating on strategy, Globo Rural reported that March. The magazine described the change as part of a professionalisation of the company’s management.

Caxambu do Sul and Levitare.

The newest plant is in the south. In March 2024 Tirolez inaugurated a cheese factory at Caxambu do Sul, in the west of Santa Catarina, the regional news site ND Mais reported on 22 March, with the state governor and local officials present. Globo Rural reported that the plant had been built over two and a half years on the site of a smaller factory Tirolez had bought in 2010, and that its first phase was dedicated to mozzarella, with infrastructure ready for further lines.

In October 2025 Tirolez made its first purchase of a brand in 45 years of operation, according to Globo Rural. On 6 October it announced that it was buying Levitare, a São Paulo maker of buffalo-milk cheeses; O Estado de S. Paulo reported the same day that the price was not disclosed and that the deal needed clearance from CADE, Brazil’s competition authority. Levitare was created as a brand in 2004 by the siblings Denise and Jorge Nakid, who began making cheese by hand from the buffalo herd on their family’s farm at Sete Barras, in the interior of São Paulo state, Globo Rural reported. Its range includes buffalo mozzarella, minas frescal, butter, a buffalo requeijão and burrata; the agreement kept the Nakid siblings in the business through the integration of the two companies, and the purchase added about 50 buffalo-milk products to a Tirolez list of 28 cheese types in more than 130 versions.

The deal closed in February 2026. CADE approved it without restrictions in November 2025, Globo Rural reported on 3 February 2026, and Tirolez took over Levitare’s operations on 2 February. The Levitare brand continues; its factory in the Vale do Ribeira runs separately during 2026, and its products already leave from the Tirolez distribution centre on the Raposo Tavares highway, the same report said. At the time of the announcement, its chief executive told Globo Rural, Tirolez had more than 600 sales promoters.

Design and documentation.

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.

From Mineirão to Levitare.

Tirolez sells to kitchens as well as shoppers. In 2025 it launched Tirolez Profissional, a platform for the food-service trade, Globo Rural reported in February 2026. Its product list, as Globo Rural described it in March 2024, runs from everyday cheeses such as mozzarella to requeijão, the spreadable Brazilian cream cheese, and on to European-style cheeses such as brie, camembert and gorgonzola.

The company’s story is one of steady additions rather than reinvention. A six-person dairy in Minas Gerais took a new name in 1981, added plants in São Paulo state and, from 2010, a site in Santa Catarina that became its newest factory in 2024; only in 2025 did it buy a second brand, and it kept that brand’s name when the deal closed in 2026. The founders, too, changed role gradually: in 2024 they handed daily management to a chief executive recruited from outside the family and moved to the advisory board.

For a design guide, Tirolez shows how a cheese maker can carry one master name across very different products, from mozzarella to blue cheese, and take on a second brand without folding it in. Compare Catupiry, another Brazilian cheese name, and Italac, another Brazilian dairy brand. For this guide we use a pasture green and a curd cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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