A flour mill whose by-products became feed.

The brand began as a flour business. According to the company’s own history, “the Pocock family of Massillon, Ohio, started the Buckeye Cereal Company in 1910.” The trade magazine All About Feed, in a centenary profile published in November 2010, gave the same start: a flour milling operation opened by the Pocock family in Massillon in 1910.

Feed came out of flour. The 2010 profile says the Buckeye Cereal Company bought a grain-buying station at Dalton, Ohio, and used the by-products of its flour to make livestock feeds sold as Buckeye Quality Feeds. The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, which holds an old metal Buckeye feed sign, tells the story the same way: a Dalton-based company that began as a flour miller in the early 1900s and sold its milling by-products as livestock feed.

Two fires shaped the business. In 1943, the 2010 profile reports, fire destroyed the main Massillon facility, and the Pocock family sold the Dalton warehouse and feed mill to its management, who renamed it Buckeye Feed Mills. In 1969 fire destroyed the Dalton plant as well; other companies made Buckeye products while a replacement plant was built, and that plant was still in use when the profile was written.

From farm feeds to horses only.

For much of its history Buckeye fed every kind of farm animal. The metal sign in the Henry Ford’s collection reads “QUALITY – PRICE – SERVICE,” then “BUCKEYE,” then “SUPERIOR FEEDS AND CONCENTRATES” and “DAIRY – LIVESTOCK – POULTRY,” and the museum describes it in cream, blue and red. It is a reminder that the brand once sold to dairy and poultry farmers as well as horse owners.

Horses came forward later. All About Feed reported that in the 1980s an equine supplement called Gro ’n Win took Buckeye into international markets, and that between 1996 and 2005 the company changed hands several times.

In September 2005 the company was bought by Mars, Incorporated, the family-owned American company behind brands such as M&M’s and Snickers. The month comes from the 2010 profile and from a 2013 profile in Stable Management; the company’s own history gives the year. After the purchase, the company says, its focus moved to horse feeds, and today it calls itself “a 100 percent equine-focused company.”

The business operates as Mars Horsecare US Inc., with the products sold under the BUCKEYE Nutrition name. Stable Management described it in June 2013 as a mill operation located in Dalton, quoting its general manager Ed Yuhas and its marketing manager Ryan Brown, who said the company relied on local farms for its grain. The company says it produces its feeds in a medicine-free facility and tests every truckload of ingredients before milling; those are its own claims.

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 capitalised name inside a Mars portfolio.

Under Mars the name is set in capitals. The company’s website and its partners’ press releases write it as BUCKEYE™ Nutrition, with a trademark symbol, the same convention Mars uses for its other equine names, and the site’s footer carries a Mars Horsecare logo and a Mars copyright line. Its page title calls it “A Family-Owned Equine Feed Company”; its history notes that Mars is “also a family-owned company,” and its stated mission is “Creating a better world for horses.”

The brand now sits in a wider Mars equine family. A June 2024 release from the publisher Equine Network, announcing a website for owners of older horses created with Linda Mars, listed the Mars equine portfolio as BUCKEYE Nutrition, SPILLERS, the WALTHAM Equine Studies Group, ANTECH, SOUND and MARS EQUESTRIAN, the group’s sponsorship arm.

Sponsorship is where the capitalised name is most visible. In August 2021 US Equestrian, the national governing body for equestrian sport in the United States, announced a continued partnership with MARS EQUESTRIAN and named BUCKEYE Nutrition its Official Feed, quoting Stacy Boyd, market director at Mars Horsecare US, on aligning the brand with the federation. The same release quoted Bill Moroney, the federation’s chief executive, and Geoff Galant, vice president of MARS EQUESTRIAN.

The Equine Network release described BUCKEYE Nutrition as feed formulated by equine nutritionists and made in a medication-free facility, wording that echoes the company’s own. On its website the brand sets out what it calls its promises: to be equine-focused and to use traceable ingredients in its formulas.

Read together, the old feed sign and the current website show a brand that kept its name through a run of changes: from flour to feed, from farm animals to horses, and from a family miller in Massillon to a division of a global family company.

For a design guide, BUCKEYE shows how a regional name can survive changes of owner by holding on to one word. Compare SPILLERS, its sister brand in Britain, and Triple Crown, another American horse feed. For this guide we use cream, blue and red with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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