A milling business that moved across Yorkshire.

Burgess Pet Care is the pet-food business of Burgess Group, a Yorkshire company that calls itself British, independent and family-owned. The regional business site TheBusinessDesk.com described it in November 2021 as a “Yorkshire family-owned pet food manufacturer,” and the company repeated the point in a 2024 blog post, saying it “began as a family business” and remains one.

Its history is a miller’s history. In a company history published in February 2023, Burgess dates its origins to 1649, at the watermill at Fountains Abbey, the Cistercian ruin near Ripon now cared for by the National Trust. TheBusinessDesk.com, in its 2021 report, gave the year as 1749; the company’s own pages give 1649. By 1790, the company says, its flour milling had moved to the mill at Kirkby Fleetham, a village near Northallerton, and in the middle of the 19th century the mill was converted to steam power.

The family business then moved east. Burgess says it came to Thornton-le-Dale, a village on the edge of the North York Moors, in 1922, and that its head office is still there, at Victory Mill. Its “Our Story” page tells the next step a little differently, placing the move into farm-animal feeds at Victory Mill in the early 1960s; both are the company’s own accounts. In 1987, it says, animal-feed production was concentrated at Cherry Tree Mill, at Pollington near Goole in East Yorkshire, which is also the address it gives for customers, and where it says its small-animal food is still made today, using local ingredients where it can.

Excel, and a week for rabbits.

The brand that defines Burgess for small-pet owners is Excel. The company dates it to 1998, when it launched the range alongside single-component extruded nuggets for rabbits — a nugget in which every piece is the same, as opposed to a mixed muesli — and TheBusinessDesk.com gave the same year in 2021. The company says the Excel range was extended through the 2000s for rabbits of different ages, and later added foods for rabbits and guinea pigs kept indoors, which it dates to 2018 and 2021. It also says it grows its own grass for Excel’s nuggets, hay and treats, can trace each batch to its field and harvest date, and manages the grass estate with a local wildlife trust, keeping hedgerows and planting wildflowers.

Burgess ties the brand to research and campaigns. It says it stopped making muesli-style foods for rabbits and guinea pigs after 2013. It launched Rabbit Awareness Week in 2006 with animal charities and veterinary bodies, it says, followed by a Guinea Pig Awareness Week in 2021 and its own awards for vets and veterinary nurses in 2020. Since 2019 it has also run a yearly campaign for rescued greyhounds and lurchers, donating food to rescue centres.

The company is not only a small-pet brand. Its current range also includes Burgess Supadog, Burgess Sensitive and Burgess Cat, and in 2022 it launched a Supadog recipe whose pack features a rescued dog. In November 2021 TheBusinessDesk.com reported that Burgess had bought Runaround, a maker of rabbit runs and homes based at Dunham Massey in Cheshire, founded in 2009 by Caroline Lord, who launched its first product, the Connection Kit, in 2010. Lord stayed on as a director under the deal. Steve Baker, then managing director of Burgess Pet Care, called it a deal between “two family-owned businesses with such similar values,” and Runaround kept its own website.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, hay, treats or bedding for small pets and birds: Kaytee, Oxbow, Supreme Petfoods, Vitakraft, Burgess, carefresh and Versele-Laga. Brands like these sit at many different points in the pet trade, from family businesses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger pet-products groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a supermarket shelf to a specialist pet shop.

A small-pet brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and a label, 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 and bedding 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 names have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name above the brand.

Burgess has used outside agencies to shape its packs. In January 2011 The Drum reported that the Leeds design firm CHILLI UK had won the job of creating new packaging for Supadog and Excel after a competitive pitch at the end of 2010; its managing director, David Whittle, said the aim was to boost Burgess’s presence on the shelf.

Another refresh came from BGN, a Manchester brand and digital agency. Its project page, which is undated, says the work began with strategy and market research into what shoppers noticed and remembered on the existing Excel packs and on competitors’ packs. Because customers recognised the Excel wordmark, BGN says, it did not replace the logo but redrew it, tidying its imperfections, and built a new lock-up that ties Excel more visibly to the Burgess name. It also says it gave each product in the range its own colour, so that owners could find the right pack quickly, and drew up a hierarchy for the information on each pack before the design began.

That arrangement — the family name as master brand, with Excel and Supadog beneath it — runs through the company’s current range, from rabbit nuggets to dog food.

For a design guide, Burgess shows how a mill with centuries of family history can build a modern pack system around one product name. Compare Harringtons, another Yorkshire pet-food brand, and Supreme Petfoods, the Suffolk small-pet food maker. For this guide we use a dale green, a hay gold and an oat white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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