A Victorian milling name that found a second life in horse feed.

The SPILLERS name is far older than its horse feed. English Wikipedia says the business began with a flour mill opened by Joel Spiller in Bridgwater, Somerset, in 1829. It spread across England and Wales, opening a mill in Cardiff by 1854 with a partner, Samuel Browne, and merging in 1889 with William Baker and Sons of Bristol to form Spillers and Bakers Ltd. Over the following century Spillers milled flour, ran bakeries and sold pet food, including the Winalot dog biscuits it introduced in 1927.

Horse feed came later. The SPILLERS company history, as archived from its website in 2011, says the business began research into equine nutrition in the 1950s and launched Horse & Pony Cubes in 1958. The brand still dates itself to that year, and Horse and Pony Cubes remain in its range, the current SPILLERS website says. The same archived history says SPILLERS became official supplier to the British Equestrian Teams in 1968, set up a French franchise in 1982 and an American one in 1996.

The ownership chain then passed through several hands. In 1979 the wider Spillers group was taken over by Dalgety plc after a hostile bid, English Wikipedia says, and its bakery business was sold to Allied Bakeries. In the late 1990s Dalgety broke the group up, selling the flour milling to Kerry Group in 1997 and the pet foods business to Nestlé in 1998. The horse feed history records a separate path: a 1998 independent buy-out from Dalgety created Spillers Speciality Feeds, which Mars, Incorporated bought in 2002, forming Effem Equine Ltd as the home of SPILLERS, WINERGY and EQUIVITE. Effem Equine bought the American feed maker Buckeye Nutrition in 2005 and changed its name to Mars Horsecare UK Ltd in 2007, the company history says.

A capitalised name, new-look bags and a show ring.

In print the brand sets its name in capitals, SPILLERS, usually followed by a trademark sign, and in trade announcements the business introduces itself in a fixed formula: “Mars Horsecare, home of the SPILLERS brand.” The phrase appears in releases and reports on appointments, products and sponsorships, keeping the old milling name in front and the Mars owner as the house behind it.

The feed bags have changed in documented steps. In August 2020, as equestrian competitions resumed after lockdown, SPILLERS refreshed the packaging of its competition feed range, according to a company release carried by VetClick on 21 August 2020; the eventer Imogen Murray’s horse Illston Jester was the face of the new-look bags. In December 2025 the brand announced new packaging for its SPILLERS Treats, sold in Apple, Spearmint and Meadow Herb flavours, in a release carried by VetClick on 16 December 2025. The new bags were to be resealable and recyclable and made partly from recycled material, and Claire Dyett, marketing manager at Mars Horsecare, described a “fresh colourful new design.” The release said the bags would be rolled out over the following months, once existing packaging had been used up.

The show ring is the brand’s other stage. Horse of the Year Show announced on 9 September 2026 that SPILLERS would be the official feed supplier for the 2026 show. In the announcement, Claire Dyett said the brand had been “here for horses and their owners since 1958,” linking it to a show that has run since 1949.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all horse feed names: Dodson & Horrell, SPILLERS, Baileys Horse Feeds, TopSpec, Saracen Horse Feeds, Buckeye Nutrition and Triple Crown. Horse feed 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 animal-nutrition groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a country feed merchant to a national farm store.

A horse feed brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bag, a name and the promise printed on it, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its milling 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 feed is actually made and bagged.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its feed is made and how its bags and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A British feed brand run inside the Mars family of companies.

Mars Horsecare runs SPILLERS from Milton Keynes. Your Horse reported on 5 December 2024 that Fiona Cayzer, who joined Mars Horsecare in 2013 and had been its chief financial officer, would become general manager, taking over from Gordon Smith, who joined in 2003, was promoted from marketing and sales director to general manager in 2020 and was retiring at the end of 2024. She was to be based at the Milton Keynes headquarters with responsibility for both the UK and US businesses; as well as SPILLERS, the magazine noted, Mars Horsecare owns the American brand BUCKEYE.

The science side sits with Mars’s pet research institute. The SPILLERS website says the brand works with WALTHAM, and Equestrian Trade News reported on 6 August 2025 that Dr Edd Knowles had been appointed global science and nutrition director for Mars Horsecare and head of the Equine Studies Group at the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, succeeding Dr Pat Harris, who moved to a senior advisory role. The same parent owns dog and cat food brands such as Pedigree, while the Spillers pet foods of old, Winalot among them, went to Nestlé in 1998, so the Spillers name now lives on with two different owners. The horse feed brand’s own site is spillers-feeds.com.

For a design guide, SPILLERS shows how a Victorian milling name, set in capitals, can be carried by a single horse feed business through a hostile takeover, a buy-out and more than two decades inside Mars. Compare Dodson & Horrell, the Northamptonshire horse feed maker founded in 1939, and Buckeye Nutrition, its American stablemate at Mars Horsecare. For this guide we use stable navy, rosette red and straw with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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