A founder, a border terrier and a London kitchen.

Lily’s Kitchen began in a home kitchen in London. Nestlé’s announcement of its purchase, in April 2020, said the business was “established 12 years ago in founder Henrietta Morrison’s kitchen in London” — that is, in 2008 — after she struggled to find natural food for her border terrier, Lily. The company itself was registered a little earlier: Companies House records show Lily’s Kitchen Limited was incorporated on 26 October 2007.

The dog sits at the centre of the brand’s story. The company’s own story describes Lily as stubborn, fussy and the perfect taste-tester, pottering around Morrison’s allotment, running on Hampstead Heath or sitting beside her in the company’s London office. Morrison, by the company’s account, started cooking for Lily from scratch and then worked out how to make the same kind of recipes for other people’s pets.

The name itself came from her design agency. In its entry in the D&AD awards archive, the London agency Albion wrote that Morrison “came to Albion with a new idea,” and that “we told Henrietta it was only natural to name her brand after her own dog Lily.” It also proposed the line that became the brand’s shorthand: “Proper Dog Food.” The phrase survives today in the company’s own tagline, “Proper food for pets.”

Out of the bleach aisle.

Lily’s Kitchen was built against the look of the pet-food shelf. Albion’s entry says the agency wanted the brand “to feel modern but have a timelessness to it,” and to say that the food in the tin was of good quality “without resorting to the usual pictures of big dog faces.” That packaging work won a D&AD Wood Pencil in the Packaging Design category in 2009, according to the D&AD archive, which lists Henrietta Morrison as the client.

The company has explained the thinking since. In 2022 Creative Review quoted Dan Kimmins, Lily’s Kitchen’s head of design, recalling that Morrison had noticed pet food was usually displayed in the same supermarket aisle as household cleaners: “displaying them in the bleach aisle didn’t feel right.” The magazine described traditional pet brands as a “stale mix of primary colour and panting-dog portraits,” while Lily’s Kitchen saw itself as a lifestyle brand “designed with doggy personalities in mind.”

Advertising followed as the business grew. In March 2017 Gorkana reported that Lily’s Kitchen had appointed Grey London as its creative agency, Cirkle for public relations and Bountiful Cow for media planning and buying, and that their first work launched during the Crufts dog show that month. Its marketing director, Chris Lock, said the three agencies would collaborate with one another, and Gorkana described the business as an “ethical pet food brand.”

The range has widened from those first tins. The company’s website today sells wet and dry food for dogs and cats, treats, dental chews, organic cat food, vegetarian recipes and a newer line of fresh recipes for dogs, with seasonal limited editions such as a Halloween stew and an advent calendar for dogs.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all British pet food names: Canagan, Lily’s Kitchen, Applaws, Harringtons, Forthglade, Burns and James Wellbeloved. Pet food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a vet’s counter or an online subscription.

A pet food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a pack, a name and the story it tells about where it comes from, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the kitchen or town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From private equity to Nestlé.

Outside money arrived in the brand’s eighth year. L Catterton, the private equity firm, invested in Lily’s Kitchen in 2015, the law firm Travers Smith said in April 2020. Nestlé’s announcement said that with its backing the brand had recently expanded into the Middle East and Asia, and had a growing presence in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany.

On 1 April 2020 Nestlé announced that Nestlé Purina PetCare had acquired Lily’s Kitchen. It said the brand “will continue to be run as a stand-alone business” from its base in Fitzrovia, London, led by its chief executive, David Milner. Travers Smith said it had advised Lily’s Kitchen’s chief executive and chief financial officer on the sale. Companies House records show Nestlé UK Ltd as the company’s controlling shareholder from 31 March 2020, and the website still gives an office on Goodge Street, in Fitzrovia. Nestlé Purina has owned the brand since 2020; within the group it sits alongside brands such as Felix and Purina Pro Plan.

Lily’s Kitchen describes itself as a certified B Corporation, part of a movement of businesses that, as its website puts it, believe in “using business as a force for good.” We give the certification as the company’s statement. Its values pages pair it with environmental language — the company says “we must collectively do what we can to reduce our carbon pawprint on the planet” — and its website carries a guide to recycling its packaging. Its website now runs shops for Britain and for several European countries, including Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal.

For a design guide, Lily’s Kitchen shows how a single pet and a single phrase — “Proper Dog Food” — can carry a brand from one kitchen into a multinational group. Compare Felix and Purina Pro Plan, two of its stablemates at Nestlé Purina. For this guide we use a kitchen red, cream and sage with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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