A Dutch factory that made chews for others.

WHIMZEES is a range of shaped dog chews made in Veendam, in the province of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands, by Paragon Pet Products Europe B.V. The brand name is written in capitals, and the chews are made in shapes such as alligators, hedgehogs and toothbrushes.

Paragon did not start as a brand owner. In a 2015 interview with the German-based trade magazine petworldwide, the company said that before it made its own treats it had produced them mainly for private-label suppliers — chews sold under retailers’ and other companies’ names. “At some stage, however, we came to the conclusion that we would do better to use our know-how and unique ingredients for our own production line,” the company told the magazine.

The result was WHIMZEES. Paragon launched the brand in 2013, and not at home: it went on sale first in the United States, where, petworldwide reported, the company won the pet-store chains Petco and PetSmart as two major customers. Paragon told the magazine that the American market was still its most important in 2015. It took the brand into Europe in 2014 and was then building a network of distribution partners country by country, planning to make the name known at retail and consumer trade shows.

When the brand was sold in 2017, the trade press named Wim Pater as the founder and chief executive of WHIMZEES.

Shapes made in Veendam.

The WHIMZEES identity starts with the product itself. In its 2015 interview Paragon described chews pressed into the shapes of toothbrushes, alligators and bones, and the brand’s current website lists lines including Brushzees, the Hedgehog, Stix and Freshzees, written, like the brand name, in capital letters.

The same interview set out how the chews are made. Paragon said they were made from potato starch, glycerin, cellulose powder, lecithin, malt extract and yeast, blended at high temperature and then pressed into shape, and its global director of marketing at the time, Lion Houkes, said the ingredients were all sourced in western Europe; we give that as the company’s account. petworldwide, which visited the factory, compared it to an automotive plant rather than a treat bakery. Houkes said it ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and could be run by two or three controllers; the company then employed 35 people in the Netherlands.

The name is part of the same playful register. “WHIMZEES,” “Brushzees” and “Freshzees” share a made-up ending that ties each product back to the parent name. Today the website presents the range as “Wellness WHIMZEES,” and it has widened beyond dogs to a range of treats for cats, in flavours such as chicken and salmon, and chicken and tuna. The brand that began in American pet-store chains now reaches well beyond them: the website offers regional versions for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand, and the German-based petworldwide reported in 2017 that WHIMZEES would continue to operate in the Netherlands under its new owner.

The dog-treat aisle.

The seven brands in this group are all dog treat names: Greenies, Zuke’s, Milk-Bone, Dentastix, Beggin’, WHIMZEES and Pet Munchies. Dog treat brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from founder-run businesses that began with a single recipe to names that now belong to much larger pet food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a veterinary practice or an online shop.

A dog treat brand’s identity is usually carried less by the treat itself than by a pack, a name and a character or colour that owners learn to recognise, 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 treats 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 treats are made and how its packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Dutch brand inside an American pet food group.

In February 2017 the American natural pet food company WellPet LLC, of Tewksbury, Massachusetts, announced that it had acquired WHIMZEES, which Powder & Bulk Solids described on 8 February 2017 as a brand manufactured by Paragon Pet Products in Veendam. WHIMZEES joined WellPet’s other brands — Wellness, Old Mother Hubbard, Eagle Pack, Holistic Select and Sojos — and WellPet said production would continue in the Netherlands. At the time of the sale, Powder & Bulk Solids reported, WHIMZEES were sold in the United States through Petco, PetSmart, Pet Supplies Plus and Pet Valu, among other retailers. WellPet’s chief executive, Camelle Kent, called the deal “a major growth opportunity for WellPet, and an exciting one,” and Pater said WellPet brought “more resources for us internationally.”

WellPet itself then changed hands. On 18 November 2020 the private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group announced an agreement to acquire the company from affiliates of the Berwind Corporation, according to the trade publication Pet Insight; PE Professional reported the same month that Berwind had built its pet food platform from the 2007 purchase of Eagle Pack in Mishawaka, Indiana, and the 2008 purchase of Old Mother Hubbard and Wellness, adding Sojos in 2016 and WHIMZEES in 2017. The chief executive, by then Camelle Kent-Rizkalla, stayed on; Clearlake, co-founded in 2006 by José Feliciano and Behdad Eghbali, is based in Santa Monica, California. At the time WellPet described its production as spread across three facilities, in Indiana, Minnesota and the Netherlands. The company’s website now uses the name Wellness Pet Company, and WHIMZEES appears there among its dog and cat brands; the company, under its earlier name WellPet, has owned WHIMZEES since 2017.

For a design guide, WHIMZEES shows how a contract manufacturer can build a brand by giving an ordinary product a recognisable shape, and then carry that shape through names, packs and imagery. Compare Wellness Pet Food, its sister brand under the same owner, and Greenies, another dog-chew brand in this series. For this guide we use an alligator green, a deep forest and a sunny yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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