A Northamptonshire family feed business that kept a partner’s name.

Dodson & Horrell began in 1939 in Ringstead, Northamptonshire. The company’s own history, as published on its website in 2009, names Claude Horrell as its founder; a 2012 version of the same site calls him a co-founder and says the Dodson family had not been involved for many years, although the company kept their name. The business never made horse feed alone: the company said in 2012 that it had been supplying traditional livestock and poultry feeds to farms and smallholdings since 1939, under what it called its Countryside range.

The Horrell family stayed in charge for decades. The 2012 company page said the business was run by John and Richard Horrell, sons of Claude Horrell. A timeline published on the company website in 2009 marks a run of dated steps. It says the company took up micronisation, a heat-treatment cooking process for cereals, in the 1970s; created the Chudleys dog-food brand in 1976 with the Chudley family, gundog breeders who had long bought cereals from the company; launched Pasture Mix, a muesli-style horse feed, in 1988; and bought a sister company, Gold Line Pet Products, in 1999. In May 2005 the head office moved from Ringstead to nearby Islip, together with a purpose-built distribution centre, the timeline says.

Ownership changed at the end of 2020. Equestrian Trade News reported on 2 December 2020 that the equine, poultry and zoo feeds business of Dodson & Horrell Ltd would combine with the animal-feed manufacturer HJ Lea Oakes from 11 December 2020. Asked whether that meant a takeover, the chief executive, Sam Horrell, told the magazine that the parent company was Oakes Millers and that Dodson & Horrell would remain a separate company, trading as Dodson & Horrell Ltd, with its range and recipes unchanged. Edward Lea, managing director of HJ Lea Oakes, said in a statement that his company had supplied Dodson & Horrell with ingredients for many years and had lately been involved in making some of its specialist lines.

Two initials, a horse and a crown of oats.

The clearest documented piece of identity work is recent. On 18 February 2025 Dodson & Horrell introduced a new logo, Equestrian Trade News reported the following day. The design is built on the company’s long-used D&H initials. The managing director, Linda Porter, told the magazine that a horse sits at the centre of the new mark, “at the heart of everything that D&H does,” and that an oat crown sits above it, standing both for the brand’s reputation and for the importance of oats to the horse. She tied the oats to the milling heritage of HJ Lea Oakes and the Lea family, “who have owned D&H since 2020,” and said the family had milled oats since 1675; Edward Lea, she said, represents its fifteenth generation.

In its own copy the brand is usually shortened to D&H, and the current website sorts its feeds by the horse’s work and stage of life, with leisure, performance, racing, breeding and veteran categories, rather than around a single hero product. Equestrian sport carries much of the visibility: in the same 2025 report Linda Porter described D&H as the nutritional partner to the British Equestrian Teams.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all horse feed names: Dodson & Horrell, SPILLERS, Baileys Horse Feeds, TopSpec, Saracen Horse Feeds, Buckeye Nutrition and Triple Crown. Horse feed 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 animal-nutrition groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a country feed merchant to a national farm store.

A horse feed brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bag, a name and the promise printed on it, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its milling 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 feed is actually made and bagged.

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

A family brand inside another family’s milling group.

Since the 2020 deal, Dodson & Horrell has described itself as part of a larger group. The company’s modern slavery and environment statements call Dodson & Horrell Ltd “part of Oakes Millers Ltd Group,” and describe it as a supplier of horse and poultry feeds to customers across the United Kingdom and abroad, as well as herbal blends. In the February 2025 report, Linda Porter said HJ Lea Oakes owns a dedicated horse feed mill that manufactures under the BETA NOPS scheme, the British Equestrian Trade Association’s code for managing naturally occurring prohibited substances, and that the owners are proud of making their products in the UK.

The name itself has stayed constant through each change. The Dodson family had not been involved for many years by 2012, the company said then, and the Horrells handed control to the Lea family in 2020, yet the company kept trading under both names and turned the initials into the centre of its 2025 logo. The brand’s main site is dodsonandhorrell.com; a separate site, dodsonandhorrellracepower.com, is linked from it for the racing range.

For a design guide, Dodson & Horrell shows how a pair of founders’ initials can carry a farm-feed business through more than eight decades and a change of owner, gaining a horse and an oat crown along the way. Compare SPILLERS, the Mars-owned horse feed brand that dates itself to 1958, and Baileys Horse Feeds, another British horse feed maker. For this guide we use paddock green, oat gold and hay cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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