Champion Petfoods, a farming town in Alberta and five dog foods.

ACANA — the brand writes its name in capital letters — is the dog and cat food line of Champion Petfoods, a company from the Canadian province of Alberta that also makes ORIJEN. English Wikipedia says Champion was founded in 1985 by Reinhard Muhlenfeld, citing a January 2018 profile in The Globe and Mail, and Champion’s present-day website says the company has been making pet food since 1985. Its own earlier website gave a different year: a version of the home page preserved by the Internet Archive in September 2002 described Champion as “an independent Canadian producer of quality petfoods,” “established in 1984” and located in the farming community of Morinville, Alberta.

That 2002 site is also the earliest record of ACANA in the sources used for this guide. Champion’s products page, captured by the Internet Archive in October 2002, presented ACANA as a range of dog foods — “all five ACANA products,” it said, for dogs from nursing mothers to seniors — and named New Zealand lamb and Canadian chicken as “the foundation of all ACANA Dog Foods.” ACANA then sat beside other Champion lines on the same page, including a lower-calorie range called Farm & Ranch, foods running from Brown Bag to Gold Plus for dogs and from Kitty Krunch to Gourmet Choice for cats, and a private-label service that made kibble to a customer’s own specification.

Even then the company was looking abroad. The same page spoke of Champion food “feeding police dogs in Chile, stray dogs in Taiwan, or house cats in Germany,” and said Farm & Ranch was sold from Canada to Guatemala and from Finland to Japan. Those are the company’s own descriptions.

Where the name comes from is told only by the brand. ACANA’s website says its name “was inspired by its birthplace,” and its Asia-Pacific site adds that the birthplace was “the farmlands of Alberta, Canada.” It does not say more about what the word means.

From “Biologically Appropriate” to “Stubbornly good.”

For a period ACANA shared its vocabulary with its sister brand. By April 2012 the brand’s own website, acana.com, described ACANA as “Biologically Appropriate™,” made from “Fresh Regional Ingredients” and “Never Outsourced,” according to a capture in the Internet Archive — the same three ideas that the builder Gray Construction later spelled out, in 2016, as Champion’s coinage BAFRINO, “Biologically Appropriate Fresh Regional Ingredients Never Outsourced.” The 2012 site divided the dog foods into two families, ACANA Classics and ACANA Regionals, and said the food was made exclusively in the company’s kitchens in Alberta.

The address itself has a history. In 2000 the Internet Archive recorded acana.com as the home of an unrelated maker of computer monitors; captures from 2003 show a parked page, and one from May 2009 offered the domain for sale. By April 2012 it carried the ACANA pet food site. Champion’s own company site is championpetfoods.com.

Today the brand speaks in a different voice. The ACANA home page carries the line “stubbornly good,” and a page on its Asia-Pacific site opens with “NO. That’s a word we use a lot at ACANA™ pet food,” before listing what the company says it leaves out — fillers and artificial colours and flavours among them — and closing with “ACANA. Stubbornly good.” The brand’s pages joke about the pets they are aimed at, offering food for a dog’s “zoomies” and for a cat’s “unwarranted entitlement.” All of these are the company’s own words.

A small typographic detail separates the two brands on Champion’s sites: the footer describes Champion as the maker of “ACANA™/ORIJEN®” pet foods, with a trademark sign on one name and a registered-trademark sign on the other.

Advertising has followed the same light tone. In March 2023 SHOOT reported that Champion had launched an ACANA campaign about the “over-the-top” love owners have for their pets, created by the agency TDA Boulder. Its spot “First Date,” in which a man’s date discovers how devoted he is to his cat, was directed by Pablo Fusco through the production companies Madre in the United States and Madre Foca in Mexico, SHOOT said. No designer or agency for the ACANA wordmark or packaging is named in the company material or press coverage used for this guide, so none is credited here.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all pet food names: Royal Canin, Purina Pro Plan, Hill’s, Pedigree, Whiskas, Felix and ACANA. Pet food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that began with a single founder or a small regional company to labels that now belong to much larger food and consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket shelf to a specialist pet shop or a veterinary practice.

A pet food brand’s identity is usually carried less by the food itself than by a name, a bag or a can, an animal on the label and the promise the company makes about where its food comes from, 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 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 packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. None of the guides assesses the food, and none repeats a company’s claims about health or nutrition.

Kitchens in two countries, then a sale to Mars.

In 2012 the brand said its food was made exclusively in Alberta. Champion’s first plant in the United States was the DogStar Kitchens in Auburn, Kentucky, in Logan County. The magazine Site Selection reported in March 2015 that the Kentucky plant was due to open in 2016; Gray Construction, which designed and built it, reported a grand opening on 12 May 2016 and said the plant had separate kitchens for ACANA and ORIJEN and would supply only Champion’s American market.

In Alberta, Trade & Industry Development reported in May 2017 that Champion would build the NorthStar Kitchens on farmland in Parkland County, with production of ACANA and ORIJEN scheduled to begin in spring 2019. ACANA’s website now says the food is made in the company’s own kitchens “in Edmonton, Alberta and Auburn, Kentucky.”

Ownership then changed. On 1 November 2022, Mars Petcare, part of Mars, Incorporated, signed a definitive agreement to buy Champion Petfoods LP from an investor group led by Bedford Capital and the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, the law firm Torys reported, and completion was announced on 28 February 2023; terms were not disclosed. Mars, the family-owned American company behind confectionery such as Snickers and M&M’s, has owned ACANA since February 2023.

For a design guide, ACANA shows how a brand can change its voice without changing its maker — from a list of capitalised principles shared with its sister brand to a single word: no. Compare ORIJEN, its sister brand from Champion, and Stella & Chewy’s, another meat-led pet food brand. For this guide we use field green, harvest gold and berry with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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