Bird food from a garden-products company.

Peckish is the wild bird food and feeder brand of Westland Horticulture, the garden-products company whose retail packs carry a Dungannon, County Tyrone address and the line that Peckish® is a registered trademark of Westland Horticulture Limited. The brand’s own website, peckishbirdfood.com, gives Westland’s office at Alconbury Hill, near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, as its contact address.

Westland describes itself as a company with “a legacy that spans over 30 years.” On its own site it lists Peckish beside its gardening names, among them Kent & Stowe, Big Tom and Unwins, and it also lists Gardman and Gardman Wild Bird, as well as product names such as Boost, Flopro, Gro-Sure, Resolva and SafeLawn under the Westland banner. The same page sets out the group’s environmental claims: Westland says it has reduced its use of peat, is moving towards plastic-free packaging, uses renewable energy at its sites and has a zero-waste-to-landfill policy. Its move into bird food was built partly by acquisition. In April 2012 TheBusinessDesk reported that Westland, headquartered in Northern Ireland, had bought Cranswick Pet Products, a Driffield maker of food for the wild bird and small animal markets, and that the purchase followed an earlier deal that had taken Westland into wild bird food. In October 2018 Gardenforum reported that Westland had bought the Gardman Group out of administration, adding the Gardman bird care range to the stable; the report gave growing interest in wildlife and in outdoor space among Westland’s reasons for the deal.

The Peckish range today covers several kinds of product. The brand’s website groups them into seed mixes and single seeds, suets and treats such as energy balls, suet pellets and nuggets, and a range of feeders, from wooden and metal designs to filled and squirrel-proof models, along with feeding stations, bird tables, bird baths and nest boxes. Named products on the site include Peckish Complete seed mix, Extra Goodness nuggets, Mini Beak Bites and Enriched Sunflower Hearts.

A plain name, a warm line and a run of campaigns.

The name does a lot of the work. “Peckish” is an everyday British word for being a little hungry, and the brand pairs it with two short lines that appear on its website: “For the love of birds” and, on its about page, “We are nuts about nature.”

The identity has been reworked more than once. In November 2018 InsightDIY reported that Peckish would enter the 2019 season with a new look and new packaging, with resealable packs across much of the food range and a new Squirrel Proof Suet Pellets product. The same report said Peckish would sponsor the Channel 4 Weather bulletins from 1 January 2019 until the end of February, as part of a “Love Every Bird” campaign led by Peckish Complete Seed & Nut Mix; Rachael Dickinson, then senior marketing manager at Westland, was quoted on the plan.

Peckish also tells its own story as a five-year plan it calls “Field to beak.” On its about page the brand says the plan launched in 2020, that in 2021 it reduced plastic by moving to kerbside-recyclable packaging, that in 2022 it cut transport miles by designing and making products in the UK, that in 2023 it introduced new sustainable products, and that in 2024 it was featured on television.

The website extends the same friendly tone into advice. Alongside the shop pages it carries a bird identifier, a seasonal guide to autumn bird care and a “Learn” section, plus a stockist finder, and it links out to Peckish channels on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or feeders for wild birds: Haith’s, Jacobi Jayne, Peckish, Gardman, CJ Wildlife, Droll Yankees and Brome Bird Care. Wild bird care 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 garden or pet groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a garden centre to a hardware store or a mail-order catalogue.

A wild bird care brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a pack and a promise about the birds it is meant for, 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 seed or feeders 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 products are made and how its packs and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Colour as a campaign, and a way into birdwatching.

Recent Peckish advertising has been built around colour. Its television campaign Colour In Your Garden returned for a third year on 5 January 2026, according to a The Dirt report of 17 December 2025. The same report described a companion idea, ColourWatch, which also launched on 5 January 2026: visitors to a dedicated website pick the colour of a bird they have seen and are given a shortlist of likely species, with images, behaviour notes and feeding tips, while the sightings are pooled as data on bird activity in the UK and Ireland. ColourWatch branding was planned for several core packs, including the Complete Seed Mix and the Extra Goodness energy balls and nuggets. The approach echoes the 2019 season, when InsightDIY reported new point-of-sale material and a pallet display unit for retailers to accompany the television sponsorship.

Kirk Rothwell, brand manager at Peckish, told The Dirt that “ColourWatch embodies what Peckish stands for – making wild bird feeding accessible, enjoyable and rewarding.”

For a design guide, Peckish shows how a plain, appetite-led name, a warm one-line promise and a recurring colour theme can carry a bird food brand from supermarket shelf to television and back to the pack. Compare it with its Westland stablemate Gardman and with the bird food brand Haith’s. For this guide we use hedge green, seed gold and robin red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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