A family business in the Kansas City area.

Greenies began as a family business in the Kansas City area. In April 2006 the Associated Press reported that the treat’s maker, S&M NuTec of North Kansas City, Missouri, was a privately held company started in 1998 by Joe and Judy Roetheli. The brand gives an earlier year: its website says the treats have been made in Kansas City “since 1996.” The two dates come from different sources, and we give both.

The founders’ own account of the start is a domestic one. In an interview published in January 2021 by the Missouri Partnership, an economic-development organisation for the state, Joe Roetheli said that their first business “was not meant to be a business” and that it began with the family’s own dogs. He added that it grew in significant part through “many informal local partnerships” in the region. By then he was chief executive of a newer Kansas City pet company, Pet’s Best Life, which sells treats under the Yummy Combs name; the interview said that company is based in Kansas City, Missouri, and launched its first product during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The product the Roethelis built the company on is easy to picture from the press of the time. The Associated Press described Greenies as a hard treat shaped like a bone at one end and a toothbrush at the other, and MediaPost, in October 2006, described it as hard and dark green. Name and object match: the treat was green, and the brand was called Greenies.

A Mars brand since 2006.

Mars bought the business in 2006. On 13 April 2006 the Associated Press reported that Mars, the maker of Snickers, Milky Way and M&M’s, then based in McLean, Virginia, and already selling Whiskas and Pedigree pet food, had signed an agreement to acquire S&M NuTec. S&M NuTec’s general counsel and a Mars spokeswoman confirmed the agreement; neither company disclosed its terms, and the deal still needed regulatory approval. The same report noted that a month earlier Del Monte Foods had bought Milk-Bone and other brands from Kraft Foods, so Milk-Bone and Greenies changed hands within weeks of each other.

One of the approvals came from Ireland. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission logged the case as “Mars MAV / S&M NuTec,” with Mars’s MAV Corp. as the acquirer, recorded the notification at the end of March and cleared it on 26 April 2006. The commission described S&M NuTec as a company that develops, manufactures and markets premium snacks and food for pets, in particular for dogs. Mars has owned Greenies since 2006.

The same year brought legal scrutiny. In February 2006 ABC News reported that the owners of a miniature dachshund had filed a lawsuit in New York alleging that the treats were indigestible; S&M NuTec told ABC News that the treats were safe. In October 2006 MediaPost reported that the makers were rolling out a new formula, which the company said it had been developing before the negative coverage.

Production stayed in Kansas City under Mars. Area Development reported in August 2022 that Mars Petcare’s plant in Kansas City, Missouri, had served as a hub for treat manufacturing since 2006, as Mars announced an expansion to add capacity for Greenies. Just Food, reporting the same expansion, listed the plant’s output as Greenies Pill Pockets, Greenies supplements and other Greenies treats, along with a Royal Canin product. The Greenies website says its treats are made in Kansas City “with quality ingredients from around the world.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all dog treat names: Greenies, Zuke’s, Milk-Bone, Dentastix, Beggin’, WHIMZEES and Pet Munchies. Dog treat brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from founder-run businesses that began with a single recipe to names that now belong to much larger pet food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a veterinary practice or an online shop.

A dog treat brand’s identity is usually carried less by the treat itself than by a pack, a name and a character or colour that owners learn to recognise, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its treats are 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 treats are made and how its packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A colour word and a single object.

Today Greenies sits among the Mars Petcare brands. Its website sets the name in capitals, as GREENIES with a trademark sign, and asks newsletter subscribers whether they would like to hear from “GREENIES brand and other Mars Petcare brands”; its footer links to Mars’s own policies on marketing and supply chains. The ranges now cover dogs and cats, and the site’s menus list Pill Pockets, supplements, a wet topper and treats for everyday use alongside the original chew. The brand says its treats follow the guidelines of the Association of American Feed Control Officials, the body that sets model rules for pet-food labelling in the United States, and it runs a blog under the title “What We’re Barking About.”

Greenies is one of several pet brands that Mars has gathered by acquisition. Mars has owned the French pet-food maker Royal Canin since 2002, and the Kansas City plant described in 2022 also made a Royal Canin product. Mars’s older pet brands include Whiskas and Pedigree, both of which the Associated Press named when it reported the Greenies deal. Under Mars, the Greenies name has stretched from a single chew to a family of products, while the company still ties the brand to the city where the Roethelis started it.

For a design guide, Greenies shows how a brand can be carried by one colour word and one recognisable object, kept constant as the range around it grows. Compare Pedigree, Mars’s dog-food brand, and Dentastix, another dog treat. For this guide we use leaf green, deep green and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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