Bimeda Brand Guidelines: Dublin Vets’ 1960 Supplier Turned Global Animal Health Group

A company set up by vets, for vets.

Bimeda began in Dublin on 22 April 1960, when, the company says, a group of Irish veterinary surgeons set up Bimeda Chemicals Limited to supply Irish vets with veterinary products. Its motto was “For and by the profession,” and because its founders were vets themselves, the company says, they knew what their customers needed. Working from premises in Phibsboro, on Dublin’s north side, the firm made its own range of veterinary remedies and also distributed products made by others. Its published history reproduces a 1963 advertisement from the journal of the Veterinary Medical Association of Ireland to show how quickly that range grew, and it says regular advertising campaigns were part of the business from the start.

The company changed hands in 1973, when, Bimeda says, it was bought by “the current Irish owners,” a family that already owned Osmond & Sons (Dublin) Limited. The same owners bought Constant Chemicals in 1975, and the three businesses were brought together on one site in Tallaght, in south Dublin. For many years that site served as a production and warehouse unit for injectables, intramammaries (products given into the udder), oral solutions, topical products and hygiene products, the company says.

By then Bimeda had a UK distribution base in Liverpool, and exports had become a strategic focus, with East Africa the most important market. The company says it began distributing products in the United States in 1991, made its first North American acquisition in 1997, and between 1997 and 2008 completed five key acquisitions in the US, Canada and Mexico, giving it research, manufacturing and sales teams across North America.

Farm animals, horses, pets and fish.

Bimeda is a maker of medicines and health products for many species rather than a single-product brand. The Irish Times, reporting in August 2022, described it as an Irish “animal health specialist” that makes drugs to treat livestock, horses, pets and other animals. The company says it developed the first intramammary teat sealant in the 1970s, and describes its soluble glass bolus, which carries several trace elements, as the only one of its kind; both are its own claims.

Much of its growth since 2010 came by acquisition. The company lists Assia in Kenya and Mogivet in Brazil in 2011, the UK export company Vetpharm in 2012, Telsol, a UK maker of boluses, in 2013, and Zootech in France in 2014. In 2016 it added the US equine specialist ArthroDynamic Technologies and two French businesses, NBVC in nutrition and Iodolab in diagnostics. In 2019 it bought the veterinary medicine portfolio of Grupo Unipharm in Central America and Texas Vet Lab, a vaccine and diagnostics business that became Bimeda Biologicals in 2020. AquaTactics Fish Health, in Seattle, followed in 2021, taking Bimeda into aquaculture, and the same year it set up Bimeda Nordic in Denmark.

Where the products are made is set out on the company’s website, which names nine manufacturing sites: Le Sueur in Minnesota, Pomona in California, San Angelo in Texas and Seattle in Washington state; Cambridge, Ontario; Denbigh in Wales, where the glass boluses are made; Monte Mor, near São Paulo, in Brazil; Ruminal in Argentina; and Shijiazhuang, in Hebei, China, a sterile injectables plant the company says began production in 2020. Bimeda UK says its headquarters, labelling and warehouse are in Llangefni, on Anglesey. Research is led from a Global Innovation Centre in Dublin, opened in 2019, working with laboratories in the US, Canada, Brazil and China, the company says.

Design and documentation.

Animal health companies speak to several audiences at once: veterinarians in clinics, farmers and producers, and the owners of dogs and cats. Their imagery tends to follow those audiences. A vet examining a dog or a cat on a consulting-room table is one of the most familiar scenes, alongside cattle in a barn, pigs in a pen and flocks of poultry, often shown with the people who look after them.

The products themselves are less photogenic, so the same few objects recur: vaccine vials, syringes, blister packs of tablets, spot-on pipettes and collars, along with laboratory benches, protective clothing and production lines. Many companies in the sector make both medicines for pets and vaccines for livestock, and their websites usually split the range by species rather than by product.

The sector also meets its customers in person. Trade fairs and congresses such as the VMX veterinary conference in Orlando and the World Veterinary Congress are where companies launch products, run booths and sponsor talks, and their stands carry much of the same photography of animals, clinics and farms.

Many of these companies also present themselves through the idea of One Health, which links the health of people, animals and the environment, and through the language of independence, family control or shared ownership where it applies. Ceva, for example, uses the slogan “Together, beyond animal health,” while Virbac points to the family that still controls it. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it and where it works.

From Phibsboro to five continents.

In August 2022 Bimeda bought Afrivet, a business based in Pretoria, South Africa, The Irish Times and Vet Times reported; Vet Times called Afrivet a distributor and The Irish Times a manufacturer, with operations in Mozambique and Zambia as well as South Africa. Both reported that Afrivet would join Bimeda’s Africa, Middle East and Asia division, headquartered in Kenya with subsidiaries in Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, and both quoted Bimeda’s statement that the deal would give it the largest footprint of any animal health company in Africa. Vet Times added that Bimeda had sold its products in Africa for four decades. At the time The Irish Times described Bimeda as a Dublin-headquartered group with operations in 11 countries and 900 employees.

The company’s own figures today are larger, and not quite consistent: one page of its website gives 1,200 employees and another “over 1000,” with products sold in more than 80 countries. Group headquarters is now in Carrickmines, in south Dublin. In 2023, Bimeda says, it made a philanthropic donation to the UCD Foundation that helped fund the UCD Bimeda Herd Health Hub at University College Dublin’s Lyons Farm in County Kildare. In Britain its current range includes the Endofluke and Ectofly products for farm animals alongside the glass bolus range made in Denbigh.

For a design guide, Bimeda shows how a supplier founded by vets can grow, through acquisitions, into a group with local Bimeda companies from Ireland and Wales to Kenya, Brazil and China. Compare Norbrook, another animal medicines maker from the island of Ireland, and Zoetis. For this guide we use a slate blue, a pasture green and a pale sea-glass tone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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