Founded in 1911 by Italian immigrants who learned from their family how to prepare a creamy-textured requeijão (Brazilian cream cheese), the brand was born in Lambari, Minas Gerais, wrapped in cellophane paper and packed in small wooden boxes. From the mineral spa town in Minas Gerais to the headquarters’ move to São Paulo in 1949, what began as artisanal production became one of the most recognized names in Brazilian gastronomy.
More than a century later, the name that means “excellent” in Tupi-Guarani remains synonymous with quality. The company now brings together more than 100 products distributed across five brands, from the original Catupiry to the plant-based Plantury line, along with Apeti, Devore and the Food Service line, and has already surpassed R$1 billion in revenue. Industrial operations take place in four plants: Bebedouro and Santa Fé do Sul, in the interior of São Paulo state, Santa Vitória, in Minas Gerais, and Doverlândia, in Goiás. Its commercial presence already extends to the United States, Canada and countries in South America.
Sustaining this scale requires more than product quality — it requires repetition. The same food safety standard, the same rigor in good manufacturing practices and the same operational excellence must repeat identically across four plants, three states and very different employee profiles. From the production line operator to the salesperson negotiating with a major food service chain, each role carries a piece of a reputation built over more than a hundred years.
Manufacturing food at industrial scale means operating under constant scrutiny. Sanitary standards, good manufacturing practices and food safety protocols are not recommendations — they are regulatory requirements, audited by regulatory bodies and by clients who answer to those same bodies. For a company that produces more than 100 items across four plants, each production line carries its own procedures, each shift has its own routine, and each unit faces local variables that no headquarters can fully anticipate.
The root cause, however, is rarely a lack of commitment from the teams. It can be found in the difficulty of sustaining, with the same quality, training that needs to reach the newly hired operator in Doverlândia and the supervisor with fifteen years at the company in Santa Fé do Sul at the same time. When food safety content depends on printed handbooks, sporadic in-person refreshers or verbal handoffs between colleagues, consistency becomes luck, not process.
The central point is not the intention to do things right. It is the absence of a system that makes “doing it right” replicable, measurable and easy to prove when an auditor asks. Without that system, each plant risks developing its own interpretation of what quality means, and a brand that took more than a hundred years to build a reputation for excellence ends up depending on the luck of whoever is on duty that day.
Without a central learning structure, the cost can show up in details that rarely make the news but weigh on day-to-day operations. A new employee takes longer to reach safe autonomy on a production line. A quality audit requires someone to hastily reconstruct a training history that should have been ready all along.
The bigger risk, however, is silent drift: each plant developing its own version of the procedure, each supervisor teaching in their own way, each regulatory update reaching Bebedouro, Santa Fé do Sul, Santa Vitória and Doverlândia at different speeds. This kind of variation doesn’t show up in a single incident — it shows up in the sum of small inconsistencies that one day become too big a problem to ignore.
Main challenges identified:
Faced with this scenario, the challenge stops being just pedagogical and becomes an infrastructure challenge as well.
The question guiding the journey is: how do you sustain the same standard of quality and food safety across four plants, in a traceable way and connected to the systems that already sustain the business?
The answer isn’t adding yet another system to the already busy routine of a food plant. It’s making training happen within the workflow that already exists: in the record that comes in automatically when someone is hired, in the certification that renews itself when a deadline approaches, in data that is already born connected to the rest of the operation. Instead of pulling the employee off the production line to train them in an isolated event, the proposal is for learning to become part of the administrative machinery that already sustains the business.
For Catupiry, this principle translates into connecting the Happmobi ecosystem directly to Proteus, the Totvs ERP that already centralizes the company’s corporate processes. Hiring data now automatically feeds the registration of new employees on the platform, eliminating the dependence on manual uploads plant by plant. Food safety and good manufacturing practice certifications now have controlled validity and automatic renewal, with history always available whenever an audit asks for evidence, at any of the four units.
This connection changes the nature of the problem: from a manual effort to reconcile systems to a synchronization that happens in the background, without anyone needing to remember to do it.
Technologies and resources that can support this design
By bringing together structured learning paths, automatic certification and direct integration withProteus, Catupiry now has a training database that is born organized — not one that needs to be organized later, under the pressure of an audit or a new hire.
With the training base connected to the ERP and replicable across units, Catupiry creates room for corporate education to keep pace with the same expansion rhythm that has already taken the brand into new countries and new product categories.
More than a hundred years ago, Catupiry was born from a family recipe meant to be repeated with the same care, day after day. Sustaining that care at industrial scale, across four plants, with hundreds of employees and a portfolio that keeps growing, may simply be the contemporary version of the same promise made back in Lambari: always do it right, for those expecting the same familiar flavor.
+ 2000
Dairy and processed food industry (requeijão, cheeses, creamcheese,plant-based products, frozen and foodservice)
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