Three founders and a kitchen.

James Wellbeloved is a pet food brand from Somerset, in the south-west of England. The company says it was formed in 1992 by Christine Priest, Robin Jackson and Michael Newsum “from the kitchen of a Somerset farmhouse,” and that the three set out to make an alternative dog food. From the farmhouse, it says, they moved to a small warehouse and began supplying dog breeders directly.

The public record matches that account. Companies House, the UK register of companies, shows a company incorporated on 3 September 1992 under the name James Wellbeloved & Co. Limited, and lists all three founders as its directors from that day until the end of 2002. The same company still exists: in January 2002 it changed its name to Crown Pet Foods Limited, and its registered office is now at Castle Cary, in Somerset, with its business described as the manufacture of prepared pet foods.

The brand’s website has been online since at least March 2000, when the Internet Archive first recorded it. That early page carried the company name, James Wellbeloved & Co Ltd, as its title, and its keywords listed the products the firm then sold: lamb and rice kibble, turkey and rice kibble, a complete food for ferrets and CrackerJacks treats. Today the brand writes its name with a trademark sign, as James Wellbeloved™, across its website.

From Crufts to Castle Cary.

The company dates its first recipe to a dog show. Its timeline says Lamb & Rice was launched at Crufts in 1993; a Turkey recipe followed in 1997, CrackerJacks snacks in 1998 and turkey recipes for cats in 1999. Later entries, by its own account, include a dog food without cereals in 2006, wet food in pouches in 2007, Superfoods recipes in 2021 and high-protein recipes in 2022, the year it says it brought its food to Europe.

Ownership changed within a decade. Royal Canin, the pet food company established in 1968 by the French veterinary surgeon Jean Cathary and now based at Aimargues in southern France, according to English Wikipedia, bought Crown Pet Foods in 1999 and the James Wellbeloved brand in 2000, according to the International Directory of Company Histories, published in 2001, and English Wikipedia’s article on Royal Canin. Royal Canin itself was then taken over by Mars: English Wikipedia records that the European Commission approved the deal in February 2002 and that Paribas sold its holding to Mars in July 2002. James Wellbeloved has therefore been part of Mars, through Royal Canin, since 2002. The brand’s website today invites readers to hear from “other Mars Petcare Brands,” and links to Mars for its privacy terms.

The factory came later. In July 2007 the trade publication AllAboutFeed reported that a Crown Pet Foods factory near Torbay Road in Castle Cary should be running by that November, more than two years later than planned, after some residents objected to the plans over traffic; it described Crown as a subsidiary of Royal Canin, with its UK base in Yeovil. James Wellbeloved’s own timeline gives 2008 for “first production at our very own factory, close to our roots in Somerset.”

Who makes it, and where.

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.

A Somerset name in the Mars family.

Where the food is made today rests partly on the company’s word. Its sustainability page names a dry food factory in Castle Cary; it does not say where its wet food is made. It also says its small dry food bags, its dog food cans and its cardboard trays are already recyclable, and that it is working to make all its packaging ready for recycling. We give those as the company’s statements. Its Companies House record lists two lines of business for Crown Pet Foods: the manufacture of prepared pet foods and the wholesale of other food.

The brand marked its 25th year in 2017, it says, with its first television advertising campaign and a new website. Its present website is built on a pale cream, #F7ECD8, and a light green, #C5D76A, which are the two colours used most often in its style sheet.

The brand name is not a founder’s: the company’s founders were Christine Priest, Robin Jackson and Michael Newsum. It is, however, shared with an unrelated public figure. English Wikipedia records that James Wellbeloved was the member of Parliament for Erith and Crayford from 1965 to 1983, elected for Labour before joining the Social Democratic Party in 1981; he has no connection with the pet food.

For a design guide, James Wellbeloved shows how a brand from a Somerset farmhouse can keep its local story after passing to a multinational owner, with its factory still in the county where it began. Compare Royal Canin, the French company that bought it in 2000, and Pedigree, another Mars dog food brand sold in Britain. For this guide we use a Somerset green and a farmhouse cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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