62 years in the same family, three generations.
A short timeline, with only what is on record. The rest we tell in person.
A surface-treatment company is not measured by its founding date — it is measured by consistency. A bath is living chemistry: the alloy drifts out of range, the passivation ages, the rectifier wavers. What keeps that from becoming a rejected part at the customer is not new equipment, it is people who have known the line long enough to notice the drift before the test does.
That is the only advantage 62 years give, and it does not appear in any catalog. It appears when a lot drifts from standard and somebody knows where to look.
The milestones on record.
Every item below comes from a document, a certificate or a publication — not from memory.
The founding
Sapucaia is born as a family-owned surface-treatment company. Control remains with the same family — which, in a chain where suppliers change owners often, is what sustains process memory.
ISO 9001:2015 certificate issued by BSI
System certification comes in and never leaves: it turns "we do it right" into an auditable record. The current certificate is FS 517766, valid until August 14, 2028.
Archive · "ISO 9001:2015 certified" post (2018)
The Guarulhos plant
Operations move to the current plant, in Guarulhos, Brazil — where the plating line, the hydrogen-relief oven and the in-house laboratory are today.
PPG (formerly Whitford) approval to apply Xylan®
The second of the company’s three approvals. Applying the XYLAN® and XYLAR® line requires the applicator to be qualified by the coating manufacturer — buying the product is not enough.
The third generation, told from outside
Revista do Parafuso, the fastener trade magazine, publishes an interview about the company’s three generations. It is the kind of record you cannot write about yourself.
Archive · Revista do Parafuso interview on the company’s history (2023)
The second spectrometer joins the line
The Skyray Thick200 XRF is installed to measure coating and alloy. The earlier Thick800A EDXRF stays in operation — and having both is what keeps process measurement going when one goes into calibration.
From service provider to protection partner
The company organizes itself around three fronts: choosing and applying the right technology, supplying the already-treated fastener and proving the coating by measurement. Same factory, a different question at the door — not "how much is the bath", but "what do I specify so this asset does not fail".
Since when has Sapucaia existed?
Since 1964: 62 years treating metal surfaces, with the same family in charge, now in its third generation — and, since 2019, at the Guarulhos plant. In a chain where suppliers change owners often, that continuity is process memory — the house that treated your part yesterday is the one that answers for it tomorrow. And that experience works under ISO 9001:2015, with an in-house laboratory and TechnipFMC, IBQN and PPG approvals.
Which approvals does the company hold today?
Three, and they are of different kinds: TechnipFMC, an OEM, for cadmium, for about ten years; IBQN, for supply to the nuclear chain; and PPG (formerly Whitford), the coating manufacturer, for Xylan® application, since 2021. ISO 9001 from BSI is system certification, not an approval, and with Petrobras the relationship is one of meeting the applicable standards, in zinc-nickel, cadmium and PTFE.