A London subscription that began in a home kitchen.

Butternut Box is a fresh dog food business based in London. It was founded in 2016 by David Nolan and Kevin Glynn, who were then colleagues at Goldman Sachs, English Wikipedia says; the pet trade site GlobalPETS described the pair as friends when it reported on the company in May 2025, and the Irish business site ThinkBusiness described Glynn as Dublin-born in April 2026. According to Wikipedia, the idea started with home-cooked meals that the founders made for Nolan’s rescue dog; they ran the business at weekends while still working at the bank, then left to run it full-time, and in 2017 the company moved into premises in west London.

The name on the box is not the name on the register. GlobalPETS reported in 2025 that Butternut Box is the trading name of Dogmates, and Companies House lists Dogmates Ltd as a private limited company classified under the manufacture of prepared pet foods. The register gives its incorporation date as November 2014, two years before the 2016 founding date that Wikipedia and GlobalPETS give for the brand; a holding company, Dogmates Holdings Ltd, was incorporated in July 2023.

The model is a subscription. Meals are delivered to the door rather than bought by the bag, and the company’s website describes them as “gently cooked at 90°C” and then frozen, and its ingredients as “human-quality,” meaning they come from the human food supply chain. Those are the company’s own descriptions. Its headline line on its website is “Because dogs deserve better.”

Doncaster, Poland and the shop shelf.

Butternut Box has grown from a London delivery service into a European one. Wikipedia records an early funding round led by Passion Capital, and in 2023 a round led by the private equity firm General Atlantic, with the existing investor L Catterton taking part, GlobalPETS reported. In May 2025 the same title reported that the company had taken debt financing from the private credit firm Liquidity, partly to fund a second production site.

Its food is cooked in England. In June 2024 GlobalPETS described the company’s site in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, as its sole manufacturing site. The second site is in Poland. In 2023 Butternut Box bought PsiBufet, a Polish fresh dog food brand founded by Piotr Wawrysiuk, and in 2024 the two companies announced a production plant of nearly 40,000 square metres at CTPark Zabrze, in the Katowice Special Economic Zone in Upper Silesia, to be built by the developer CTP and expected to be fully operational by mid-2025, GlobalPETS reported. Nolan, described there as founder and chief executive, said the plant would let the company deliver fresh food faster to Germany and other countries in mainland Europe.

By May 2025 the company was delivering in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Poland, GlobalPETS reported, and selling in selected Pets at Home stores in the UK. In April 2026 ThinkBusiness reported its first move into shops in Ireland, in 35 Maxi Zoo stores. In 2024 it began selling fresh cat food under a separate brand, Marro. Wikipedia says the company was certified as a B Corporation in 2022, and its website carries the B Corp mark.

Pet brands and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all pet names: PetSafe, KONG, Chuckit!, West Paw, Ruffwear, Kurgo and Butternut Box. Between them they cover much of what an owner buys for a dog beyond the animal itself — toys, ball launchers, beds, collars, leads and harnesses, gear for car journeys and outdoor trips, and food. Pet brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from founder-run workshops to labels that now belong to much larger groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a specialist shop to a supermarket aisle or a delivery subscription.

A pet brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a colour, a pack and a tone of voice, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products 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 packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Fresh Food. Happy Dogs.”

The brand has been shaped by one studio over most of its life. The London design agency Otherway says it “helped create the Butternut Box brand at its inception.” An archived version of Otherway’s project page from August 2020 put it slightly differently, saying the studio had worked with the founders “to help reposition their delivery dog food business,” across “every consumer touchpoint from packaging to digital,” under the headline “Innovatively putting the food back into dog food.”

The latest stage is a brand platform called “Fresh Food. Happy Dogs.” Campaign reported its launch in January 2026. Otherway says the platform was “designed with radical simplicity at its core,” and that an “evolved brand world” kept the brand’s personality while “featuring updated brand fonts and illustrations.” It credits that work to the Butternut Box in-house design team, working with Otherway, and lists TV, outdoor, radio and digital advertising, including a manifesto film for television; its credits name the photographer Dan Burn-Forti and the director Paul Butterworth.

Earlier advertising leaned on dogs rather than food. In July 2022 The Drum reported a London poster campaign called “Fresh Food So Good,” placed on sites across central and Greater London, which showed five dogs, picked through a competition called #DogsDeserveBillboards, eating quickly rather than showing the product. Wikipedia also records an edible billboard the company put up in south London in 2023.

The voice carries into the menu. The recipes stocked by Maxi Zoo in Ireland in 2026 included Pork This Way, Salmon To Love, Chicken You Out and Gobble Gobble Turkey, ThinkBusiness reported, punning names in the same light-hearted tone.

For a design guide, Butternut Box shows how a subscription food brand can build its identity around the dog rather than the dinner, with punning recipe names, illustration and photography of dogs. Compare The Farmer’s Dog and Ollie, two American fresh dog food subscriptions. For this guide we use squash orange, plum and pea green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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