John Burns, West Wales and a batch of food with a leaflet glued on.

Burns Pet Nutrition is the company of John Burns, a Scottish veterinarian, as Swansea Bay News described him in December 2023, listed with the BVMS and MRCVS veterinary post-nominals in a 2022 VetClick report. The company says the idea grew out of his work as a vet in the 1980s: a commercially available pet food modelled on home cooking.

The business started in 1993 in West Wales, and the company tells the beginning in very plain terms: John, a car full of pet food and a first batch of two tonnes, packed in plain polythene sacks with a leaflet glued to the front. That first “packaging” is worth noting in a design guide, because it shows a brand that started with almost no visual identity at all and let a printed explanation do the work that a label normally does.

National attention came through the dog press. The company says that in 1995 Beverley Cuddy, the editor of Dogs Today, published an article titled “Back to Basics” about the food, which brought in many enquiries and helped Burns move from a local business to a national one. The firm is based in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire, where Food Manufacture reported in 2023 that it ran its product development, marketing, sales, finance and operations.

Rosemary oil, Welsh farms and a foundation in Kidwelly.

The range grew slowly from dry dog food. The company says that in 1997 it began using vitamin E and rosemary oil to keep its food fresh in place of chemical antioxidants, and that its wet food followed in 2009, made with ingredients sourced from farms in Wales. A cat range came much later: Food Manufacture described it as recently introduced when it reported on the company in December 2023.

Much of what the Burns name stands for in Kidwelly sits outside the food itself. VetClick reported in 2022 that the John Burns Foundation was set up in 2006 (the company’s own timeline lists the charity, under the name Burns Pet Nutrition Foundation, in 2007) to support disadvantaged people through recreation, life skills, community arts and outdoor programmes. Its flagship project, Burns by Your Side, pairs school children with trained volunteers and reading dogs to build literacy and communication skills, and the foundation has its home at the Canolfan John Burns Centre in Kidwelly, the same report said; it added that the company supported more than thirty charities over the long term. The company says it became an accredited Living Wage Employer in 2015 and, marking 25 years of trading in 2018, pledged to give a quarter of its profits to charity.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all British pet food names: Canagan, Lily’s Kitchen, Applaws, Harringtons, Forthglade, Burns and James Wellbeloved. Pet food 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 food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a vet’s counter or an online subscription.

A pet food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a pack, a name and the story it tells about where it comes from, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the kitchen or town 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 packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a founder-owned firm to Assisi Pet Care.

After three decades in John Burns’s hands, the company changed owner at the end of its thirtieth-anniversary year. Food Manufacture reported on 8 December 2023 that Assisi Pet Care had acquired Burns Pet Nutrition for an undisclosed sum, and that John Burns was retiring after about thirty years of owning and growing the business. He said Assisi would grow the brand responsibly and ethically. Peter Mangion, Assisi’s founder and chief executive, called Burns a perfect fit because animal health and well-being were central to the brand.

Assisi, founded by Mangion, had set out what it called a value creation plan built on organic growth, product range, geographic reach and acquisitions, and said Burns would help it strengthen its offer across Europe. The deal was its first since the American private equity firm Wind Point Partners bought the group in October 2023, the paper said, adding that the Kidwelly team would join Assisi; Swansea Bay News reported that the management team was staying with the business. At the time Food Manufacture counted more than six thousand stockists for Burns, including outlets in Hong Kong and Portugal. Assisi has since grown again: in July 2026 it bought the Devon dog food maker Forthglade, and the Burns website now names Assisi Pet Care as the company behind it. The group’s other brands, Food Manufacture listed that month, include Hollings, HiLife and Pet Munchies.

One practical note: “Burns” is a common name in Britain, shared by Burns London, the guitar maker, and by the Scottish poet whose supper gives Burns Night its name, so the full company name and Kidwelly are the reliable search terms.

For a design guide, Burns Pet Nutrition shows how a brand can start with no packaging design at all — two tonnes of food in plain sacks with a glued-on leaflet — and build a name around a founder, a town and a charity rather than a mascot. Compare Forthglade, its Devon sister brand under Assisi, and James Wellbeloved, another British natural pet food. For this guide we use estuary blue, brown rice and Welsh slate with a book serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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