Vitarella Brand Guidelines: The Jaboatão Pasta and Biscuit Maker Inside M. Dias Branco

A Pernambuco trade name from 1993.

Vitarella is a pasta and biscuit brand from Jaboatão dos Guararapes, the municipality on the southern edge of greater Recife, in Pernambuco. It began in 1993 as the trade name of Indústria de Alimentos Bomgosto Ltda, Portuguese Wikipedia says, and M. Dias Branco, its owner since 2008, gives the same year and the same town for the brand’s founding. In a notice to investors dated 15 April 2008, M. Dias Branco described the company it had just bought as one that had begun operating in 1993, producing and selling pasta and cookies at its plant in Pernambuco under the Vitarella and Treloso brands, among others.

The early years ran from pasta to biscuits. Portuguese Wikipedia dates the Treloso biscuit line to 1998 and Vitarella’s cracker to 2000; M. Dias Branco’s brand page says Vitarella was initially focused on pasta before it widened its range. Writing in July 2024, the Diario de Pernambuco described the brand as 31 years old and still headquartered in Jaboatão dos Guararapes, with a portfolio of more than 150 products sold across four of Brazil’s regions: the North, the Northeast, the Southeast and the Centre-West.

The same report listed six Northeastern states where its lines are sold: Pernambuco, Paraíba, Alagoas, Rio Grande do Norte, Bahia and Sergipe.

Adria, M. Dias Branco and Pilar.

The brand changed hands in April 2008. On 7 April that year Adria Alimentos do Brasil, a subsidiary of M. Dias Branco, bought all the shares of Indústria de Alimentos Bomgosto, according to M. Dias Branco’s investor notice of 15 April 2008. The buyer is itself a Northeastern company: Portuguese Wikipedia traces it to a bakery opened by Manoel Dias Branco in Fortaleza in 1936, and gives its headquarters as Eusébio, in Ceará. Its shares have traded in São Paulo since 2006, on the exchange now called B3, under the code MDIA3, the same source says. Portuguese Wikipedia adds that Vitarella’s company passed to M. Dias Branco’s direct control in November 2008.

Under its new owner, Vitarella’s company became a buyer too. In 2011 Bomgosto signed an agreement to buy all the shares of NPAP Alimentos, the Recife maker of Pilar biscuits and pasta, according to a material-fact notice published by M. Dias Branco; the notice put the deal to a shareholders’ meeting and to CADE, Brazil’s competition authority, and dated Pilar’s origins to 1875. Portuguese Wikipedia records the purchase as made in 2011.

The legal company then disappeared into its parent. On 27 December 2013, Portuguese Wikipedia says, Indústria de Alimentos Bomgosto was wound up and incorporated into M. Dias Branco, which took over its brands, plants, products, customers and teams. Vitarella has continued since then as a brand rather than a separate company. M. Dias Branco’s brands page lists it alongside other regional labels in the group, among them Adria and Zabet, and in October 2026 Valor Econômico reported that the group, with 22 brands, was concentrating its marketing mainly on three of them: Vitarella, from Pernambuco; Piraquê, from Rio de Janeiro; and Adria, from Porto Alegre. Each, Valor wrote, was meant to travel nationally without losing the regional character that tied it to its home.

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.

Frevo, cordel and São João.

Vitarella’s range now covers more than pasta and biscuits. M. Dias Branco’s brand page lists pasta, biscuits, chocolate-covered lines, cakes and margarine under the name, and names sub-brands including Treloso, Chocoresco and D-Tone. In a July 2024 feature, Folha de Pernambuco quoted the brand’s marketing manager naming the Personal Cracker line and its instant noodles, sold as Lámens.

Its marketing leans on Pernambuco’s culture. On 15 May 2024 the brand launched a campaign called “Vitarella e Pernambuco: aqui tem diferença” (roughly, “Vitarella and Pernambuco: here there is a difference”) at the Paço do Frevo, the frevo centre in Recife’s old quarter, Folha de Pernambuco reported; the launch brought together frevo dancers and a maker of the giant carnival puppets of the region. In July 2024 the Diario de Pernambuco reported a new wafer line, Dupla de Sabores, pairing regional flavours such as green corn with guava paste, and quoted the marketing manager saying its special-edition packs carried design references to cordel, the folk-poetry pamphlets of the Northeast. The same report listed sponsorship of the Paixão de Cristo passion play and of the Paço do Frevo’s “Escolas que Frevam” programme for schools. It also described Cartola Cristal, the brand’s version of cartola, a traditional Pernambuco dessert, served at restaurants at the Paço do Frevo and the Marco Zero square, and an audiovisual campaign about where the brand began.

For a design guide, Vitarella shows how a regional brand can keep its home-state accent after it has become one label among many in a national group. Its online presence followed the same line: in 2011, Portuguese Wikipedia says, the brand relaunched its website with links to its social-media accounts and a recipe contest for its customers. Compare 3 Corações, another Brazilian food brand in this series, and Tirolez, a Brazilian food maker that grew from one small town. For this guide we use a brick red and a biscuit gold with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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