A founder-led horse feed maker in Minnesota.

Triple Crown is the brand name of Triple Crown Nutrition, Inc., a horse feed company headquartered in Wayzata, Minnesota. The company says it was established in 1989, a date it repeats on its own website and in the background notes of its press releases, including one published by the United States Equestrian Federation in September 2015. Its website, triplecrownfeed.com, puts the company’s focus in five words: “And all we do is horse.”

The person most closely tied to the brand is Rob Daugherty. A press release carried by The Chronicle of the Horse in July 2013 quoted him as the company’s chief executive, and releases in 2015 and 2019 did the same. By 2020 the company’s announcements were naming him as founder and chief executive officer, the title he still carried in a June 2025 announcement reported by Pet Insight. In March 2020 he told US Equestrian that “for more than 30 years” the company’s mission had been to make horse feed from the best ingredients it could find, a line that fits the 1989 date the company gives for its start.

For most of its history Triple Crown has been sold through a network of shops rather than its own stores. The 2013 and 2015 releases described the company as selling its products mainly through independent horse feed dealers across the United States, and its website still sends buyers to dealers across the country. Its feeds, the company says, are corn free and made to a fixed formula, “so horse owners know what they’re getting in every bag.” The trademarks on the site, including the brand name and the EquiMix name, are registered to Triple Crown Nutrition, Inc.

The thread running through the range is a blend the company calls EquiMix. In a January 2020 release it described EquiMix as “a unique blend of yeast cultures, organic minerals, prebiotics, probiotics and digestive enzymes,” and it says every one of its feeds contains it. The same release listed some of the products a shopper would meet: Triple Crown Senior, Triple Crown Complete, Triple Crown Lite and a fortified Safe Starch forage.

A crown, a promise to go “beyond,” and a website that answers questions.

The name is a phrase from American horse racing, but the brand’s marketing has been built around a single word. The Minneapolis agency Kick, which presents Triple Crown as a client on its own website, says “Beyond” became the overarching campaign for the brand, and its case study quotes the client describing an “Always Beyond” promise carried through packaging, social media, video and in-store material. The same idea turns up in the company’s own words: the boilerplate on a US Equestrian release of March 2020 described Triple Crown as a company “that always goes beyond.”

Kick says the campaign was built to reach horse owners across digital channels, lead generation, video, events, influencers and packaging, and that it drives people to a refreshed company website where they can compare feeds. One of the images in the agency’s case study pairs a horse and rider at sunrise with the “Always Beyond” line, a crown and the Triple Crown mark.

The website itself has long been part of the brand’s face. In July 2013 the company announced a new site at triplecrownfeed.com in a release carried by The Chronicle of the Horse. It promised a more modern layout, an integrated blog, mobile compatibility, an upgraded dealer locator and online chat with feeding experts, and quoted Daugherty saying, “It is time to take our website to the next level.” The current site keeps that practical bent, with a feed selector and a tool for comparing one feed with another.

Sport sponsorship has kept the name in front of riders. In September 2015 US Equestrian announced Triple Crown Nutrition as the Official Feed Sponsor of the US eventing, show jumping and dressage teams, including the Land Rover US Eventing Team. When the federation announced a renewal in March 2019, Daugherty called the company “the long-time official feed sponsor of USEF,” and the boilerplate of that release also listed it as official feed sponsor of the National Barrel Horse Association and the United States Pony Clubs. A further US Equestrian release in March 2020 confirmed the sponsorship for that year, and the company’s website today calls Triple Crown the Official Feed of The United States Pony Club and an arena sponsor of the South Point Arena.

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.

From the dealer’s shelf to a national farm store.

A new route to buyers opened in January 2020. A release datelined Wayzata on 23 January, published by TheHorse.com, announced that a selection of Triple Crown feeds would go on sale in most Tractor Supply Company stores and online from 27 January, with Senior, Complete, Lite and the Safe Starch forage on the shelf and other items available to order. Daugherty said the company was “thrilled to partner with Tractor Supply” to make its feeds easier to find.

Tractor Supply also became the home of a newer range. In June 2025 Pet Insight reported that Triple Crown Nutrition and Standlee Premium Products, a forage company, were launching the Triple Crown Diamond Line, rolling out through 2025 and sold only at Tractor Supply. The forage products in the line are made with Standlee Premium Western Forage and carry Triple Crown’s EquiMix, and the line also includes feeds named Diamond Perform, Diamond Senior and Diamond Balancer. The announcement quoted Daugherty, again as founder and chief executive, and Scott Plew, president of Standlee Premium Products.

The name needs a little care online. “Triple Crown” is first of all the American racing title won by a horse that takes the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes in one season, and the phrase is shared by an unrelated record label and many other businesses. The feed company’s own site is triplecrownfeed.com.

For a design guide, Triple Crown shows how a feed brand can take its name from a racing title and then make it practical: a single blend named on every product, and a one-word promise to go “beyond” repeated from the sponsorship banner to the dealer’s shelf. Compare Buckeye Nutrition, the Ohio horse feed brand, and SPILLERS, the British horse feed name. For this guide we use crown indigo, crown gold and bag white with a classic serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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