A zoo keeper who wanted cleaner seed.

Haith’s dates itself to 1937. Its own history, written by a grandson of the founder, says John “Ted” Haith was head keeper at Grimsby Zoo and in charge of its bird collection, and that he was frustrated that the seed he bought was uncleaned and uneven in quality. The company says he experimented with home-made contraptions until a tin bath borrowed from a neighbour gave him a way of cleaning seed — a method it still describes as a secret.

According to the same account, other zoos and bird keepers began asking for his seed, and he eventually left the zoo to run the business. In 1947, the company says, he bought a war-damaged, three-storey chapel in Cleethorpes, repaired it and fitted it with seed-cleaning machinery. Offices went up on the site of an old army Nissen hut; seed went out in cotton sacks that customers returned for credit, and orders travelled by British Rail to Royal Mail sorting offices for delivery.

The paperwork fits a family firm that formalised later. Companies House records John E. Haith Limited as incorporated on 13 July 1961, and lists members of the Haith family among its directors since before 1991, including David Haith; Simon King, who signs company announcements as a director, was appointed in 2000 and again in 2020. A Lincolnshire Bird Club post of December 2021 described the business as family-run.

Clean seed, and a red that went fishing.

The company’s central idea is cleanliness. It calls its process “SuperClean”, says it removes grain dust and debris from seed before blending, and describes its cornerstones as “quality, service and value.” Haith’s says it is a manufacturer rather than a reseller: it cleans, blends and packs its own mixes, and sells direct online and by phone, with click-and-collect in Lincolnshire. Its range runs from wild-bird food for garden feeders to seed and soft foods for budgerigars, canaries, finches and parrots — the aviary trade that the 2021 Bird Club post called its traditional market.

The company also describes how it works behind the label. It says its products are quality-controlled in-house with laboratory checks, that it buys raw materials only from reputable sources and keeps its mix recipes consistent, and that it supports people entering avian nutrition through its Haith’s PRO scholarship schemes. Its pricing message, “Feed More Birds for Less,” rewards buying in larger bags.

The other half of the business is angling. Haith’s owns the trade mark Robin Red, which it describes as “a natural rust-brown red colour food” for boilie base mixes, groundbait, hookbaits and liquids, alongside related marks such as Robin Gold. The company’s published trade-mark licence lets approved bait firms put Robin Red on part of their packaging, provided it is used at minimum inclusion rates and the product remains clearly the licensee’s own, and the licensed use may include the coloured robin logos listed in the company’s schedule of trade marks.

That licence is the nearest thing to a published brand rule. The company says its aim is a clear distinction between baits that contain Robin Red and those that do not, and the licence lets it ask licensees for samples to check that their products comply.

Haith’s also turns up in the wider bird-care trade: the Kent birdcare supplier Jacobi Jayne lists Haiths among the mail-order specialists it recommends as stockists of its own feeders and foods.

Feeding wild birds, as a trade.

The seven brands in this group all make food or feeders for wild birds: Haith’s, Jacobi Jayne, Peckish, Gardman, CJ Wildlife, Droll Yankees and Brome Bird Care. Wild bird care 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 garden or pet groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a garden centre to a hardware store or a mail-order catalogue.

A wild bird care brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a pack and a promise about the birds it is meant for, 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 seed or feeders 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 marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Cleethorpes to Louth.

The chapel lasted for decades, but the company says the site became unworkable: it sat in a residential area, and the lorries and 40-foot containers bringing raw ingredients struggled with a mini-roundabout outside. After a search it moved to a purpose-built factory with its own seed-cleaning plant on Europarc in Grimsby, a business park whose bus route, cycle lanes and landscaped pond the company’s history mentions by name. By December 2021, the Lincolnshire Bird Club post reported, Haith’s had spent 13 years there, had sold the premises to its neighbour New England Seafood International and was leasing them back, and had earmarked a site on the Fairfield industrial estate in Louth.

Construction in Louth was under way by September 2022, with the local firm Rase Engineering as principal contractor, the company wrote, and the plans included a wildlife pond, an attenuation pond for drainage and native trees. In December 2022 it said swift boxes had arrived for the new building’s eaves. Haith’s closed on Friday 24 March 2023 and reopened from The Bird Food Centre in Louth on Monday 27 March, according to a notice signed by Simon King. The company presents the move as a project to hand commercial space over to nature. Companies House now gives that address as the registered office, and lists the company’s activities as the manufacture of prepared feeds and pet foods and the wholesale of seeds and animal feeds.

For a design guide, Haith’s shows how a family firm can build a brand on a process — clean seed — and on a single licensed ingredient name. Compare Versele-Laga, the Belgian family feed maker, and Jacobi Jayne. For this guide we use a rust red, seed gold and a fen green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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