Dry biscuits in Bedfordshire.

Felix is a British cat food brand owned by Nestlé Purina PetCare, the pet food business of the Swiss group Nestlé. It is not related to the Swedish food brand Felix of Eslöv, which shares its name.

Its roots are in a small dry-food company. English Wikipedia, citing Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Trade Name Origins (1983), says Felix Catfood Ltd began as a maker of dry cat biscuits before the Second World War, with a single factory at Biggleswade in Bedfordshire.

In 1970 the American food company Quaker Oats bought the firm, English Wikipedia says, citing Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History and a 1977 Monopolies and Mergers Commission report on cat and dog foods. Production moved to Quaker’s factory at Southall in west London, and a new range that included tinned wet food followed.

Purina’s Australian website tells the early history differently. It says Felix was “originally launched in Holland by Ralston Purina” and that “it wasn’t until the brand was acquired by Quaker in 1982 that it truly flourished.” The British sources cited by Wikipedia place the firm in Bedfordshire and the Quaker purchase in 1970. We give both accounts.

What cats are really like.

By the 1980s Felix was in difficulty: English Wikipedia says large retailers were considering de-listing it. In 1989 it was relaunched with a new range and a new mascot, a black-and-white cat called Felix.

The relaunch became an advertising case study. The paper “Felix Advertising 1989–95: How the cat that crept got the cream,” by Les Binet and Richard Butterworth, won a Silver award in the IPA Effectiveness Awards in 1996, according to WARC and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising; the IPA now files it under the agency adam&eveDDB. The IPA’s summary describes a new product formula, the brand’s first advertising budget and a new personality built around “what cats are really like.” The campaign ran first in newspapers, then on television from 1991 and on posters from 1993, the IPA says.

Ownership changed twice in the 1990s. In 1995 Quaker sold Felix, together with its European pet food division, to Spillers, owned by the British food group Dalgety, English Wikipedia says, citing The Independent of 4 February 1995. Dalgety, which had bought Spillers in 1979, then sold the Spillers pet foods business to Nestlé. English Wikipedia’s article on Felix dates that sale to 1997, while its article on Spillers gives 1998, citing Dalgety’s own announcement; we give both dates. Nestlé has owned Felix since then, and the brand now sits in the Nestlé Purina PetCare portfolio.

Spillers brought a pet food history of its own to that sale. English Wikipedia says it introduced Winalot dog biscuits in 1927 and took over the Kennomeat dog food brand in 1964, and that after Nestlé’s purchase Winalot was expanded into a range of dog foods and snacks.

The character has carried the brand since 1989. In January 2023 Nestlé announced that Robbie Williams had become the voice of Felix, with a song written for a Europe-wide campaign, “It’s Great To Be a Cat.” The advert premiered on YouTube on 25 January 2023, Nestlé’s UK press release said, describing Felix as “the most mischievous cat around.”

Purina UK’s own announcement called it the brand’s latest “It’s Great To Be a Cat” campaign. In the short film, it said, Williams plays second fiddle to Felix as the two try to record the song with an orchestra; the song was released on a dedicated website, FelixandRobbie.com, on 25 January and on Spotify two days later, and the campaign ran on television, video-on-demand, Meta and TikTok. Purina’s group marketing director, Fabio Degli Esposti, spoke of combining the food with the “treasured Felix-the-cat character.”

Pet food and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all pet food names: Royal Canin, Purina Pro Plan, Hill’s, Pedigree, Whiskas, Felix and ACANA. Pet food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that began with a single founder or a small regional company to labels that now belong to much larger food and consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket shelf to a specialist pet shop or a veterinary practice.

A pet food brand’s identity is usually carried less by the food itself than by a name, a bag or a can, an animal on the label and the promise the company makes about where its food comes from, 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 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 packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. None of the guides assesses the food, and none repeats a company’s claims about health or nutrition.

A black-and-white cat.

Felix is not sold under one name everywhere. English Wikipedia lists the Felix name in markets including the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, India and Chile, and says the brand is sold as Pussi in France, Italy, Greece, Sweden and Denmark and as Latz in Finland. Purina’s Australian website says the brand is present in Europe, Asia, Oceania and Latin America.

The format has changed with the market. English Wikipedia, citing Metro in May 2018, says Felix has made only wet food in plastic pouches for the UK since 2018, as demand for tins declined. The range also includes dry food, treats and milk, according to Wikipedia.

The constant is the cat. Purina Australia says the black-and-white Felix character still appears on packaging, and the 2023 campaign built its song around him. No official colour values are published, so the black, white and red here are our interpretation.

For a design guide, Felix shows how a character introduced at a relaunch can become the brand itself. Compare Purina Pro Plan, its Nestlé Purina stablemate, and Whiskas, the Mars cat food brand it competes with in Britain. For this guide we use black, white and a red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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