Killgerm Brand Guidelines: An Ossett Supplier, PestWest Fly Traps & 13 Countries

An Ossett name on the public register since 1976.

Killgerm is a supplier rather than a pest control service. It sells products, training and technical advice to the people who do the work, and its customer-facing company is Killgerm Chemicals, based in Ossett, West Yorkshire. The company calls itself “the UK’s leading pest control product supplier and provider of training and technical support.”

The public register gives the firmest dates. Companies House lists the group’s parent company as incorporated on 12 August 1976 under the name Killgerm Chemicals Limited. A second company was incorporated on 2 March 1993 as Killgerm Group Limited, and on 4 January 1994 the two swapped names: the 1976 company became Killgerm Group Limited, registered for head-office activities, and the 1993 company became Killgerm Chemicals Limited, registered for chemical manufacturing and wholesale trade. Both give Ossett as their home, and Killgerm Group Ltd describes the town as its global headquarters.

Ownership has stayed private. Companies House records three people with significant control of the group, each holding control over the trustees of a trust, rather than an outside corporate owner or a listed parent. Killgerm says its group board controls all assets and allocates resources to the operating companies, with three executive and three non-executive directors.

The group once reached beyond pest control. In April 2019 it announced the sale of TravelWise Group, a leisure and business travel company it said had been part of Killgerm Group since 1993, to the French travel company Travel Planet. That left the group focused on its pest control divisions, which Killgerm says now include operating companies in the UK, Benelux, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain, France, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and China.

Two divisions, Killgerm and PestWest.

Killgerm Group runs two main lines, which its press releases call the Killgerm Division and the PestWest Division. Killgerm distributes products from other makers alongside its own: the group says that, apart from the products it manufactures or formulates itself, it is the major pest control distributor for global companies such as Envu, BASF, Bell Laboratories and Syngenta. PestWest makes electric fly killers and insect light traps.

Growth abroad has come largely through buying long-standing partners. In November 2015 the group completed the purchase of Starkeys Products of Perth, Western Australia, which it said had made insect light traps and electric fly killers under the Starkeys name for over four decades; the release placed PestWest’s existing operations in the USA, the UK and China. In November 2019 it completed the purchase of Milluck AB, a Malmö supplier founded in 2007, which became Killgerm Scandinavia, adding Sweden to Killgerm Division operations in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

Ireland followed in March 2021, when Killgerm completed the purchase of Sprayclear Environmental, based near Dublin, a sub-distributor it said it had worked with for three decades. Killgerm France formally began operating in January 2023, and in September 2024 the group announced that it had bought an operations centre for it at Saint-Georges-de-Reneins, north of Lyon, with offices, production and warehousing.

PestWest also gained a new home. In October 2024 Killgerm announced that PestWest Electronics had completed its move to Symphony House in the Wakefield 41 industrial park, with a dedicated manufacturing section and its research and development team, and named its LED fly traps built on its Quantum X technology among the products made there. In December 2020 PestWest’s flyDetect remote flying-insect monitor was named joint winner of a new-product award at the Society of Food Hygiene and Technology awards, the company reported.

How the category presents itself.

A pest-control brand is mostly met in working places rather than in shops: on the side of a service van, on a technician’s shirt, on a branch sign, on a service agreement and on an invoice. When Rentokil Initial bought Western Exterminator in 2012, the seller’s president told the Orange County Register that customers would “still see our trucks” and the same people at the door. The companies themselves publish these vehicles, uniforms and branch pages as the public face of the business, so a guide to the category starts there.

Some of the older American firms lean on a character or a family name. Western Exterminator’s little man with a big hammer has been in use long enough to be parodied on The Simpsons in 1995, according to English Wikipedia, while Ehrlich still carries the surname of the man who started it in Reading in 1928.

Service plans are the other naming layer. A company that sells recurring visits gives its plans names, and those names sit beside the company name on websites, quotes and contracts; they have to read clearly in small type and stay consistent with the main mark. This guide looks at names, marks and colour as the companies present them, and does not reproduce any logo, livery or uniform.

Behind many local names sits a larger owner. Rentokil Initial’s 2012 annual report lists Ehrlich, Presto-X and Western as “country-specific” brands under one shared brand essence, and its 2025 report describes keeping 30 pest brands, national, regional and local, in North America. Corporate pages on owners, acquisitions and branch networks are therefore part of how these brands present themselves, and each guide notes who owns the name today.

Training, stewardship and a group of local names.

Much of Killgerm’s public identity is built on knowledge rather than products. The company runs training courses from basic principles to specialist and professional levels, and says it was the first training provider to offer the RSPH Level 3 Diploma in Pest Management. It describes its technical department as one of the largest of any distributor in Europe, and says that department also carries out quality-control auditing for major food companies.

Stewardship is the other recurring theme. Killgerm says it helped pioneer the Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use (CRRU), runs a waste disposal scheme for redundant pesticides and used packaging, operates a quality management system certified to ISO 9001:2008, and has been registered with the BASIS scheme for many years. It lists membership of the British Pest Control Association and the National Pest Technicians Association, and work with the National Pest Advisory Panel of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.

The group is now international but keeps local names. In July 2026 Killgerm Group announced a new leadership structure, with a group chief executive, finance chief and marketing chief, while each subsidiary stays under a local managing director; the release described a group of 15 operating companies in 13 countries on four continents, headquartered in Ossett. Its country websites run under the Killgerm name in markets including France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden, while Starkeys kept its own name in Australia.

For a design guide, Killgerm shows how a trade supplier can carry one plain name across many countries while sister brands such as PestWest keep their own identity; compare Pelsis and Rentokil. For this guide we use an ink blue, a cloud grey and a signal amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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