A feed shop near Bremen and five generations of one family.

Vitakraft is one of the old names of the German pet trade. The company’s own timeline begins in 1837, when Heinrich Wührmann founded a firm under the family name, Wührmann, at Heiligenrode, a village near Bremen. German Wikipedia describes it as a small feed shop, and the company says the same: “it all began with the founding of a small feed merchant’s near Bremen.”

The business stayed in the family. The brand name came almost a century later: the company’s timeline says the Vitakraft brand was introduced in 1929 by Heino Wührmann, who led the business in the fourth generation. In 1937 the firm marked its hundredth anniversary, the timeline says; German Wikipedia gives 1937 as the year the headquarters moved to Bremen. After the Second World War, the company says, its destroyed plant had to be rebuilt, which it dates to 1946.

Growth followed in the post-war decades. The timeline records a network of distribution centres across West Germany in 1960 and the start of international expansion, in Switzerland, in 1966. Heiko Wührmann took over as head of the company in the fifth generation in 1978. In 1983, according to the timeline, a new headquarters was built at Achim, near Bremen, and from 1985 the company expanded further abroad, including into the United States and Asia. Its press releases today give Bremen as the company’s home, and in 2021 it says it built and opened VitaCube, a fully automated high-bay warehouse.

The Kräcker, the Beef Stick and a range for every pet.

Vitakraft makes food, snacks, toys and care products for dogs, cats, birds, small animals, fish, tortoises and even hedgehogs, its website says. Its best-known product is the Kräcker, a seed bar for birds and small animals that the company says it launched in 1965. In June 2025, marking the Kräcker’s sixtieth anniversary, Vitakraft described it as baked in three layers on a stick of natural wood and said it makes the Kräcker in its own factory in Germany. Sarina Hamann, then head of international marketing, said in the same release that the snack’s appeal lay in combining food with activity, because the animal has to work for its food. The company calls it “The Original,” and the anniversary was celebrated with promotions in shops and on social media.

The company’s 2026 relaunch material names the Kräcker and the Beef Stick, a meat snack for dogs, as products many shoppers know without connecting them to the Vitakraft name. That gap is the reason given for its most important design change in years.

Vitakraft’s identity has long been built on blue and white. In the press release announcing its relaunch, on 22 June 2026, the company said that blue and white remain its core brand colours but would be used more prominently, joined by lively accent colours. The release said the redrawn logo drops its three-dimensional elements, the former wave and the heart symbol that had marked the brand for years, in favour of a clearer, tidier look. Typography would also become clearer, with an expressive supplementary typeface to carry the brand’s tone of voice.

Small pets as a category.

The seven brands in this group all make food, hay, treats or bedding for small pets and birds: Kaytee, Oxbow, Supreme Petfoods, Vitakraft, Burgess, carefresh and Versele-Laga. Brands like these sit at many different points in the pet trade, from family businesses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger pet-products groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a supermarket shelf to a specialist pet shop.

A small-pet brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and a label, 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 food and bedding 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 names have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A change of owners in 2013 and a new promise in 2026.

The family sold control in 2013. On 17 July that year the trade magazine PET worldwide reported that, subject to final checks, the Wührmann family had sold the Vitakraft works in Bremen to two new shareholders: a private investor who did not wish to be named and the pet-food manufacturer Deuerer. The family would keep a minority stake. The next day the German trade title Lebensmittel Praxis reported that Deuerer, a maker from Baden-Württemberg that produced only retailers’ own-label foods, wanted to take over its Bremen competitor and that the Federal Cartel Office would decide within weeks. German Wikipedia, citing Handelsblatt, says Vitakraft has been part of the Tiernahrung Deuerer group since 2013; the company’s own timeline records simply “a change in the ownership structure” that year. German Wikipedia names the parent as P.F.I. Vitakraft GmbH.

The brand’s newest chapter is its relaunch. After two years of development and market research in several countries, the company said in June 2026, Vitakraft adopted a new brand promise, “Die entspannteste Art, dein Tier gut zu versorgen” — the most relaxed way to look after your pet well — and a new claim, “Gut gemacht.” (“Well done.”). The company said the short phrase works three ways: as praise for the animal, as a statement about the products and as reassurance for the owner who bought them. The claim is to be adapted for each market rather than translated word for word.

Sarina Hamann, managing director and chief marketing officer, said in the release that many pet owners knew and bought Vitakraft products without consciously noticing the brand, and that the relaunch was meant to change that. The company said the packs would be organised around how shoppers choose at the shelf rather than around product logic. It planned the first product range in the new design for September 2026, the first visible changes at its Bremen headquarters from late summer and the switch of its social media channels from November.

For a design guide, Vitakraft shows how an old brand can simplify its mark while keeping the colours people already recognise. Compare Versele-Laga, a Belgian bird and small-animal food maker, and Supreme Petfoods, a British small-pet specialist. For this guide we use blue, white and a seed gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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