Fullwood Packo Brand Guidelines: From a 1785 London Importer to Today’s Fullwood

A London importer that moved to Shropshire.

The name on this guide is a retired one. Fullwood Packo was the trading name of a milking and milk-cooling group based at Ellesmere, Shropshire. Its milking business was sold to the Dutch company JOZ in 2022 and now trades simply as Fullwood, with its headquarters at Middenmeer in the Netherlands. The story behind both names runs back much further than either.

Farmers Weekly, in a 2010 profile by Michael Williams, traced the business to Matthew Fullwood, who founded a company in London in 1785 to import annatto seed, used for dyeing leather and foods such as cheese. The range grew to include rennet, also used in cheesemaking. A member of the Bland family joined in 1835 and the firm became Fullwood and Bland; in 2010, the magazine said, the holding company above the group was still called RJ Fullwood & Bland.

The move to Shropshire came in 1918, when rennet production left London for a new site at Ellesmere, Farmers Weekly reported. During the 1920s the firm imported cream separators and other dairy equipment. Milking machine production began at Ellesmere in 1940 and expanded quickly through the 1950s and 1960s as dairy farmers gave up hand milking. By 2010, the magazine said, the company made machines for sheep, goats, buffalo and camels as well as cows.

The company counts its age from that first London business. FarmingUK reported in 2009 that it would mark 225 years in 2010 and was launching a robot called the Merlin 225 for the occasion; today it speaks of 240 years. Its wording varies. A 2025 news item says Fullwood has been “active in milking technology since 1785,” while its About page says it has worked with dairy farmers “for more than 90 years.” Farmers Weekly places milking machines at Ellesmere from 1940.

Packo, Merlin and the Dutch owners.

The Packo half of the name came from Belgium. Commercial links began in 1968, when Fullwood & Bland formed a joint company with Packo, which Farmers Weekly described as an old-established maker of farm equipment including milk cooling tanks. In 1994 Fullwood & Bland took Packo over, adding its cooling products to the milking machine business. By 2010 the group also made industrial equipment for pharmaceutical and food-processing customers, and worked in stainless-steel fabrication and surface treatments.

Robots became its best-known products. Farmers Weekly dated the Merlin automatic milking system to 1997, with Crystal herd management software as an integral part of it; Fullwood says it has officially been a maker of milking robots since 1996. The next generation, the M²erlin, was introduced in 2014 and the first went into operation in 2015, the company says. Its FULLSENSE robot software followed in 2023.

Not all of that robot was built at Ellesmere. Shropshire Live reported in April 2019 that PP Control & Automation of Cheslyn Hay had become a strategic outsourcing partner on the M²erlin, taking fabrication and machined parts once made by Fullwood Packo into its own supply chain to free up space at Ellesmere.

Ownership had changed by then. TheBusinessDesk reported on 21 August 2015 that the Dutch Verder Group had bought the 230-year-old Fullwood Packo Group. Farm Contractor reported in June 2019 that it had formally become the Fullwood Packo Dairy Group, part of Pindustry, the investment company of the Verder Group, with production at Ellesmere; Zedelgem in Belgium; Kanturk in County Cork; and Shanghai.

How farm technology makers present themselves.

Farm technology makers sell to a small, expert audience, and they tend to show the machine at work rather than on a plinth. A milking robot is photographed in a working barn with a calm herd around it, often under the cool blue light of a modern parlour. A feed robot, usually in clean red and white, glides along a barn aisle with no driver in sight. The pictures make one argument again and again: the work carries on while the farmer is elsewhere.

Poultry and hatchery equipment has a different geometry. Long feed lines and drinker lines run down the length of a house to a vanishing point, and hatchery trays stack into tall, regular grids. These are images of repetition, and they suit a trade in which a single building holds a very long run of identical equipment. Irrigation goes the other way, from inside to overhead: drip lines are shown from the air, running through green rows in thin, straight strokes.

The trade meets face to face at a handful of fairs. EuroTier and Agritechnica in Hanover, World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin, and the VIV shows for the poultry and livestock industries are where new ranges appear, and some of the awards these companies quote come from such events.

Many of these names are old, and many have changed hands. Family firms, industrial groups and investment companies all appear in this guide, and a founder’s surname often outlives the founder’s company. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who started it, who owns it now, and what it says about where its products are made.

A rebrand, a sale and a split.

The double name got a formal rollout in 2019. That January Shropshire Live reported a rebrand by Yarrington, a marketing company in Shrewsbury, covering a new website translated into five languages, a company video and exhibition graphics, in a project “migrating the company’s ‘Fullwood’ name to ‘Fullwood Packo.’”

Three years later the group came apart. In June 2022 Pindustry sold Fullwood Milking to JOZ, the Dutch maker of manure and feed-pushing systems, Boerenbusiness and TheBusinessDesk reported; Boerenbusiness said the deal, in JOZ’s own words, made it a “one stop shop” for dairy farmers. The Irish side followed. Fullwood Packo in Ireland, which the Irish Farmers Journal called Cork-based, went into liquidation in August 2022, the paper reported that September, and the business was split: JOZ bought the Irish milking equipment business, while three Irish Packo dealers took on the Packo bulk tanks, made at Packo Cooling in Belgium. Packo Inox, a separate stainless-steel business at Diksmuide in Belgium, describes itself as part of the Verder Group.

Cooling came back through a partner. In June 2023 Fullwood announced an exclusive partnership with Mueller, so that its dealers could sell cooling tanks.

The Ellesmere site changed hands the following year. Shropshire Live reported in August 2024 that Triang Developments had acquired the factory complex, part of it still occupied by Fullwood JOZ Limited, for redevelopment as Fullwood Business Park. By October 2025 Fullwood’s own releases carried a Middenmeer dateline, and its website now gives Middenmeer as its headquarters alongside a UK telephone line.

JOZ’s website says Rabo Participaties is its majority shareholder, and in March 2026 Fullwood announced that chief executive Maarten van Raaij and finance chief Steven Le Poole had become minority shareholders of JOZ and Fullwood alongside it. The company says it has more than 150 employees. In September 2026 it launched the Merlin 2+, which it describes as a stainless steel milking robot and the next generation of its flagship product.

For a design guide, Fullwood Packo shows how a double-barrelled name can record a merger, and how quickly it can be unpicked once the parts are sold. Compare BouMatic, another milking name built from older companies, and Lely, a Dutch maker of milking robots. For this guide we use a pasture green, a cream and an ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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