A feed mill near Dayton and a dog food with a number for a name.

Iams takes its name from Paul Iams, an animal nutritionist from Ohio. English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times, says he was a graduate of Ohio State University and founded the Iams Company in 1946 in a small feed mill near Dayton, Ohio. A history of the company published in the International Directory of Company Histories and reproduced by FundingUniverse adds that he was the son of a Dayton animal-feed store owner, that he sold his father’s dog food to kennels and veterinary clinics, and that before the Second World War he worked selling soap for Procter & Gamble, the company that would buy Iams in 1999. Four years in the Navy followed before he started his own business.

The same history traces the range back to a single dog food, Iams 999, introduced in 1950, followed in 1961 by Iams Plus. It says the idea behind the recipe came from a visit Paul Iams made to a mink ranch in 1946, where he noticed that the working dogs were eating the same feed as the mink. The brand’s website today puts the story in its own words: it says Paul Iams worked with breeders and nutritionists and “gained insights into the significance of protein and the function of fat in pet food diets.”

For its early decades the business stayed small and regional. The FundingUniverse history says Iams did not advertise and, through the 1960s, sold in only five Midwestern states, distributing through dog breeders, kennels and veterinarians rather than through grocery stores. The history says word of mouth was the company’s only advertising in those years.

The change came with Clay Mathile, an Ohio native who had worked as an assistant purchasing agent at the Campbell Soup Company and who joined Iams in 1970. The early 1970s were difficult. National wage and price controls stopped the company from passing on rising ingredient costs, and the history says Iams chose to keep its recipe rather than switch to cheaper ingredients, so that by 1973 it was selling at a loss. In the mid-1970s Mathile and his wife bought half of the company. The FundingUniverse history dates Paul Iams’s sale of his remaining half to the Mathiles to 1981, when he retired; Wikipedia, citing the Cincinnati Business Courier, says Mathile became sole owner and president in 1982.

From breeders’ kennels to Procter & Gamble, then Mars.

Under Mathile the company began to market itself. The FundingUniverse history says he bought a quarter-page advertisement in Dog World magazine and started visiting dog shows to promote the food, and that distribution soon became nationwide. He also changed the product’s form. Company literature quoted in the history described the old food as looking like “potting soil mixed with corn flakes,” and in an interview with Nation’s Business in July 1988 Mathile recalled dogs sniffing it and spitting it out. By 1976, after advice from a pet-food equipment maker, Iams was producing a conventional pellet.

A second brand followed. Eukanuba took its name, the history says, from a favourite expression of Paul Iams, who had picked it up from the jazz musician Hoagy Carmichael; it was used to mean “the best.” The company outgrew its Dayton base and built a plant at Lewisburg, Ohio, and later a factory at Aurora, Nebraska, in the mid-1980s. Iams added cat food in 1981 and then foods arranged by life stage, for puppies and kittens, adults and older animals, a structure Wikipedia still describes in the range today. In 1988, the history records, the company launched its mass-market advertising, while continuing to hand out educational pamphlets through breeders and veterinarians.

In September 1999 Mathile sold Iams to Procter & Gamble, Wikipedia says, citing The New York Times. In April 2014 P&G announced that it would sell Iams, Eukanuba and Natura to Mars in all markets except Europe. A Mars press release dated 1 August 2014 said the company had completed the acquisition of the three brands in North America, Latin America and other select countries, and that it would also exercise an option to buy P&G’s pet-food business in parts of Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, including Australia, Japan and Singapore. The release placed the brands inside Mars Petcare, alongside Pedigree, Whiskas, Royal Canin, Banfield and Nutro.

Europe went a different way. Wikipedia, citing a Business Wire release of 31 December 2014, says P&G sold its European pet-care business, including Iams and Eukanuba, to Spectrum Brands that month. The result is a brand with two owners: Mars has owned Iams since 2014 outside Europe, and Spectrum Brands has owned it in Europe since the end of the same year, each running its own website for the name.

Design and documentation.

The eight brands in this group are all dog and cat food or treat names. Pet-food brands sit at many different points in the trade, from companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food or confectionery groups, and a single brand may be sold under more than one name in different countries.

A pet-food brand’s identity is carried mostly by its bag, can or pouch: the name set large, a photograph or drawing of an animal, a few strong colours that make a range easy to sort on a shelf, and sometimes a mascot or a jingle remembered from television. Because the company behind the name may have changed hands several times, the questions behind each name are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packs and advertising have changed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its origins, its owners over time and its advertising — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A founder’s surname, set in capitals.

The core of the Iams identity is the founder’s surname. Paul Iams’s name was on the company from 1946 and on its products from Iams 999 onwards, and it has outlasted three owners. Wikipedia gives the pronunciation as “eye-ams,” and Mars’s own press releases set the name in capitals, as IAMS, the same treatment the company gives Eukanuba and its other brands in those releases.

The brand’s early presentation was shaped by where it was sold. Iams reached owners through breeders, kennels and veterinarians, and the company history describes its promotion in those terms: educational pamphlets distributed through breeders and veterinarians, a quarter-page advertisement in Dog World, and visits to dog shows. The company’s mass-market advertising did not begin until 1988, more than four decades after the founding.

The range itself is organised as an identity system. Wikipedia describes foods arranged by life stage, for puppies and kittens, adults and mature animals, alongside veterinary formulas, so that the Iams name sits above a set of sub-ranges sorted by the age of the animal rather than by flavour. Eukanuba, the second brand the company created in the 1970s, carried a different name taken from an expression Paul Iams liked, and the two names have travelled together through every change of owner since.

The 2014 division adds a practical complication for anyone working with the brand. The same name is now stewarded by two companies in different parts of the world: Mars, which presents Iams on iams.com, and Spectrum Brands, which presents it in Europe on iams.eu. The iams.com site still leads with the founder, describing how Paul Iams founded The Iams Company in 1946.

For a design guide, Iams shows how a founder’s surname can carry a brand through a sale to a consumer-goods group and a division between two new owners, with the product range organised beneath it by life stage. Compare it with Pedigree and Whiskas, its stablemates at Mars Petcare. For this guide we use kennel green and kibble tan on bag cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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