A tuna packer, a number and a proverb.

9Lives began as a sideline of a tuna business. English Wikipedia says the cat food was introduced in 1959 by the tuna processor StarKist Foods, and its article on StarKist describes 9Lives as having been launched as a tuna-based cat food. The brand’s own website says 9Lives cat food first went on sale in 1959 as a wet food and later expanded into dry food. The name compresses the old proverb that a cat has nine lives into a numeral and a word, and the brand writes it as a single run-together mark, 9Lives; newspapers of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and UPI, printed it with a hyphen as “9-Lives”.

StarKist was soon part of a larger food company. The H. J. Heinz Company acquired StarKist in 1963, English Wikipedia says, and The New York Times dated the purchase in the same way in 1994, writing that the Leo Burnett agency had been hired by Star-Kist in 1958, five years before Heinz bought the tuna company.

Under Heinz the pet food became a business of its own. The Los Angeles Times reported on 2 November 1988 that Heinz had divided its Star-Kist Foods subsidiary in Long Beach, California, into separate seafood and pet food operations: the tuna business became Star-Kist Seafood Co., while the pet food division, whose flagship brand was 9-Lives, became Heinz Pet Products Co. The paper listed the division’s other cat foods as Amore and Kozy Kitten and said both new companies would stay in Long Beach.

The brand’s address today is 9lives.com, where the cat food is presented in Morris’s own first-person voice.

Heinz, Del Monte, Big Heart, Smucker and Post.

Heinz kept 9Lives until 2002. On 13 June 2002, UPI reported, Heinz signed a definitive agreement to merge several of its American businesses into Del Monte Foods in an all-stock transaction. Heinz would place its StarKist seafood, North American pet food and pet snacks, private-label soup, College Inn broth and baby food businesses into a new subsidiary, spin it off to its shareholders and merge it straight into Del Monte, and the combined company would keep the Del Monte name. The brands named in the transaction included StarKist, 9-Lives, Kibbles ’n Bits, Pup-Peroni and Snausages, so the cat food and the tuna that had started it moved together to the San Francisco-based Del Monte.

Del Monte later separated the two. In February 2014, Business Wire reported, Del Monte Foods sold its consumer products division to Del Monte Pacific, a deal that closed on 18 February, and relaunched what remained — its pet products business — as Big Heart Pet Brands, with a portfolio that included 9Lives, Milk-Bone, Meow Mix, Kibbles ’n Bits, Nature’s Recipe and Gravy Train. Big Heart’s life as an independent company was short. The Plain Dealer reported that The J.M. Smucker Co., the Ohio maker of preserves, peanut butter and coffee, first disclosed its purchase on 3 February 2015 and closed it on 23 March 2015, adding the San Francisco company’s pet brands, 9Lives among them, to its own.

Smucker kept 9Lives from 2015 until 2023. On 28 April 2023, in a statement issued through PR Newswire, Smucker announced that it had closed the sale of several pet food brands — Rachael Ray Nutrish, 9Lives, Kibbles ’n Bits, Nature’s Recipe and Gravy Train, along with its private-label pet food business — to Post Holdings, after agreeing the deal on 8 February. The sale included the related trademarks and licences and manufacturing facilities in Bloomsburg and Meadville, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence, Kansas. Smucker kept Milk-Bone and Meow Mix, which its chief executive named as the focus of its pet strategy. Post Holdings has owned 9Lives since 2023, and Post Consumer Brands, the Post Holdings business that markets it, lists 9Lives among its pet food brands.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all sell food for cats, dogs and other household pets. Pet food reaches its buyer through a small set of familiar formats: the printed paper or plastic bag of dry kibble, the steel or aluminium can of wet food, the foil pouch and the cardboard multipack, each stacked in long rows on a supermarket or pet-shop shelf where many rival names sit side by side.

On a crowded aisle, a pet-food brand’s identity is carried mostly by its pack. The front panel usually pairs a wordmark with a photograph or illustration of an animal, a band of colour that separates one recipe or life stage from another, and a short line naming the flavour. The same logo may be adapted for a tall bag, a squat can lid and a small pouch, so its shape, colour and lettering have to hold together at very different sizes and on different materials.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who owns it now, and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Morris, Sylvester and a cat that signs the can.

The brand’s face is a cat with opinions. Morris the Cat was created by the Chicago advertising agency Leo Burnett, which, The New York Times reported in November 1994, Heinz had hired for 9-Lives in 1967 and which introduced “Morris the finicky cat” in 1969. The same agency created Charlie the Tuna for StarKist, so the two brands that started together under one roof were also given their characters by one agency. English Wikipedia describes Morris as a large orange tabby who eats only 9Lives and makes his preference known with dry voice-over remarks, and says every can carries Morris’s “signature”.

Morris was found, not drawn. The brand says an animal talent scout, Bob Martwick, discovered the cat at the Humane Society in Hinsdale, Illinois, in 1968, and that the agency’s art director called him “the Clark Gable of cats”. Reporting in 1989 for the Baltimore Evening Sun, carried by the Los Angeles Times, Ellen Hawks wrote that Martwick had selected both cats to play Morris up to then and that the second, found in a shelter in New England, began his career in 1979; she also described a June Adopt-a-Cat month sponsored by 9-Lives and the American Humane Association. Burnett ran a mock presidential campaign for Morris in 1988, the Times recalled, and the brand says he campaigned again in 2012 and led a cat adoption campaign in 2006.

For a while the dry food had a different cat. English Wikipedia says that in the late 1970s and early 1980s 9Lives used Warner Bros.’ Sylvester on the packages and in animated commercials for its new dry cat food, with Sylvester calling it “worth riskin’ your life for”, and that by 1986 Morris had replaced him on the dry packaging and in its advertising.

In November 1994 Leo Burnett and Heinz agreed to end their relationship on the brand, the Times reported, adding that Morris would continue to appear on packages and in promotions. He has: the brand’s website is written in his voice, and it says 9Lives launched a new look with brighter packaging in 2025.

For a design guide, 9Lives shows how a character can become a stable part of a brand — signing the can, speaking on the website and staying in place while the company behind him passed from a tuna packer to Heinz, Del Monte, Big Heart, Smucker and Post. Compare it with StarKist, the tuna brand it started beside, and Kibbles ’n Bits, which moved with it from Heinz to Del Monte and on to Post. For this guide we use tabby orange, marmalade and milk white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep 9Lives’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.