A dog biscuit from a sea-biscuit bakery.

Wellness is a younger brand than the company behind it. The Wellness Pet Company traces its own story to Old Mother Hubbard, a dog-biscuit business it dates to 1926, and further back to A. Hubbard & Son, a bakery in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that the company says made hard-tack sea biscuits from 1873. In the company’s telling, the dog biscuit began when a local sailor threw one of those biscuits to his dog, which ate it happily; that is the company’s story rather than a documented event.

In 1961, the company says, Old Mother Hubbard was bought by Jim Scott Sr., whom it describes as a professional in animal nutrition. English Wikipedia adds that he moved the business to Lowell, Massachusetts. In the 1990s, according to the company, his son Jim Scott Jr. began working with a team of animal-nutrition experts, veterinarians and scientists on a new premium food, and the result was Wellness, which the company says was launched in 1997. English Wikipedia gives slightly different dates for the first dog and cat recipes, so the 1997 year is best read as the company’s launch date for the brand.

Other lines followed under the same roof. The company dates its Holistic Select food to 2000 and the higher-protein Wellness CORE sub-brand to 2007. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s own history, says the original Old Mother Hubbard business made small dog biscuits as an offshoot of the Hubbard bakery, and that Jim Scott Jr. was chief executive in the 1990s.

The biscuit name has not disappeared. Old Mother Hubbard is still sold, now as Wellness Old Mother Hubbard, so the oldest name in the company’s history sits under the brand that was created from it decades later.

From Catterton to Berwind to Clearlake.

Wellness has changed hands twice since the Scott era. PE Professional reported in November 2020 that Old Mother Hubbard and Wellness Pet Food had been a portfolio company of the private-equity firm Catterton Partners before Berwind Corporation, the Philadelphia holding company, bought it in 2008. Berwind had entered pet food a year earlier, in 2007, by buying Eagle Pack, a dog-food maker based in Mishawaka, Indiana. The combined business traded as WellPet, according to English Wikipedia.

Under Berwind, WellPet added more brands. The same report says it bought Sojos, a raw pet-food maker in Minnesota, in 2016, and WHIMZEES, a dental-chew maker in the Netherlands, in 2017. The company says each deal brought a factory with it: a plant in Minnesota with Sojos and a plant at Veendam, in the Netherlands, with WHIMZEES.

On 18 November 2020, Clearlake Capital Group, the private-equity firm based in Santa Monica, California, agreed to buy WellPet from affiliates of Berwind, PE Professional reported the next day. At that time the company was headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, made its food at three facilities in Indiana, Minnesota and the Netherlands, and was led by chief executive Camelle Kent-Rizkalla, who was to stay in the role. English Wikipedia, citing Pet Food Industry, says Reed Howlett succeeded her in 2021. Clearlake has owned the business since 2020, and in 2022 WellPet renamed itself the Wellness Pet Company, English Wikipedia says, citing Pet Food Processing and Pet Food Industry.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell to people who keep pets: Hurtta, LickiMat, ORIJEN, Tiki Cat, Wellness, Stella & Chewy’s and Frisco. Some make food and treats, some make the gear around the bowl — coats, mats, crates and toys — and they reach owners through very different routes, from specialist pet shops to large online retailers.

They also sit at different points in the trade, and two examples show the range. ORIJEN is made by Champion Petfoods, which Mars Petcare has owned since 2023, when the closing of its purchase from an investor group was announced. Frisco is not a separate company at all but an own label of the online retailer Chewy, which says it launched the brand in 2016 as its first private brand for durable goods.

A pet brand’s identity is usually carried by its packaging, its name and the story it tells about where its products come from, and those can stay the same while the company behind them changes hands or moves production. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and where its products 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 packaging and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. None of these guides makes any claim about the health effects of a product.

One brand name over a family of brands.

Today Wellness is both a product line and the name over the whole company. The Wellness Pet Company’s website lists its brands as Wellness, Wellness WHIMZEES, Wellness Old Mother Hubbard, Wellness Good Dog, Holistic Select, Eagle Pack and Sojos. English Wikipedia dates the Good Dog treat brand to 2022 and the company’s first supplement line to January 2023.

On where the food is made, the company’s own locations page, as of October 2026, lists a home office in Burlington, Massachusetts, manufacturing at South St. Paul, Minnesota, and at Veendam in the Netherlands, commercial offices in Singapore, Sydney, Taipei and Tokyo, and regional offices in Brussels and in Derby, in the United Kingdom. In November 2020, by contrast, the company was described as making its food at facilities in Indiana, Minnesota and the Netherlands.

The brand is sold well beyond the United States. As of 2026 the Wellness Pet Food website offered regional versions for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and Europe. English Wikipedia also records a fresh-food line, Wellness Bowl Boosters Freshly, introduced in June 2022, and says the company joined the Pet Sustainability Coalition in April 2023. The company also runs a charity arm, the Wellness Foundation, which it says works with non-profit organisations to help pets in need.

The brand describes its recipes in terms of ingredients — “fresh protein first,” dried proteins, fats, carbohydrates and added fruit and vegetables, in the words of its About page — and those are the company’s descriptions rather than independent findings.

For a design guide, Wellness shows how a newer product name can grow until it becomes the name of the company that launched it. Compare ORIJEN, another premium dry-food brand now owned by a larger group, and Tiki Cat, a cat-food brand built around its recipes. For this guide we use a meadow green, cream and a harvest gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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