Who Owns Your Dog Food? 40 Brands and Their Parent Companies (2026)

Short answer: four companies own most of the big names in the dog food aisle. Mars owns Royal Canin, Iams, Eukanuba, Pedigree, Nutro, Nom Nom, and since 2023 Orijen and Acana. Nestlé Purina owns Pro Plan, Purina ONE, Beneful, Dog Chow, and Merrick. Colgate-Palmolive owns Hill's. General Mills owns Blue Buffalo.

Three mix-ups show up in search data again and again, so here they are first:

• Is Iams made by Purina? No. Iams belongs to Mars, which bought it from Procter & Gamble in 2014. Purina belongs to Nestlé. The two are direct competitors.
• Is Hill's owned by Purina? No. Hill's has belonged to Colgate-Palmolive since 1976. There is no such product as "Purina Science Diet". Science Diet is Hill's.
• Are Iams and Eukanuba the same company? Yes. Both came from P&G, and Mars bought them together in 2014.

Every brand and its parent company

Sorted alphabetically. "Since" is the year the current parent acquired the brand. A dash means the parent created the brand or has always owned it.

Linked brands have a full page scoring them against WSAVA's five manufacturer questions.

The four companies behind most of the aisle

Mars

Mars owns nine of the 40 brands in the table, more than any other company. They run the full price range, from Pedigree on the bottom shelf to Royal Canin's breed-specific bags at the vet clinic, plus a fresh-food subscription in Nom Nom and, since Champion Petfoods closed in February 2023, the Orijen and Acana lines.

That spread matters if you are trying to "avoid big pet food". An owner who switches from Pedigree to Orijen for that reason has moved from one Mars brand to another.

Nestlé Purina

Purina makes Pro Plan, Purina ONE, Beneful, Dog Chow, and the Pro Plan Veterinary Diets prescription line. It bought Merrick in 2015 and said at the time that Merrick would keep operating as an independent business. The next section shows what that means in practice.

Colgate-Palmolive

Hill's is Colgate's pet business, and has been since Colgate bought Hill's former parent, Riviana Foods, in 1976. Science Diet and Prescription Diet are both Hill's. Colgate owns no other major dog food brand.

General Mills

General Mills bought Blue Buffalo in April 2018 for about $8 billion, the deal that took a cereal company into pet food.

Ownership does not tell you how a food is made

This is the part most ownership lists skip. A big parent company does not pass its research staff, feeding trials, or plants down to every brand it buys.

Merrick is the clearest case. Purina has owned it since 2015. Purina ONE and Pro Plan both meet all five of WSAVA's manufacturer-quality questions, but Merrick does not. Merrick's food is still made in the Hereford, Texas factory, which Purina now runs, and its Classic Healthy Grains adult label says the food is "formulated to meet" AAFCO profiles, which means it was not proven in a feeding trial. Merrick was also among the 16 brands the FDA named most often in its 2019 update on diet-associated heart disease in dogs.

Orijen and Acana are the second. Mars owns them now, but buying Champion Petfoods did not turn them into Royal Canin. Their substantiation and their WSAVA scores are their own.

So "who owns it" and "who makes it, and how" are separate questions. Our check of 9 popular brands against the WSAVA criteria goes brand by brand, and it finds the gap running in both directions: Purina ONE inherits Purina's full standards, while Merrick does not.

The brand on the bag and the company that makes it

A brand owner and a manufacturer can be two different companies.

Kirkland Signature is Costco's label, but Costco does not make dog food. Costco's 2025 pet FAQ said Diamond Pet Foods made all of Kirkland's dry foods, and a 2012 recall report named Diamond too. Diamond also makes Taste of the Wild and Diamond Naturals in its own plants. We could not check a current bag, so Diamond is the reported maker, and the "manufactured by" line on the bag you buy settles it. Smaller brands often go further and pay a contract manufacturer, a co-packer, to produce their recipes alongside other companies' food.

You can check this yourself on the bag. AAFCO rules require every label to name the manufacturer or distributor. Read the wording:

• "Manufactured by" followed by the brand's own company means it makes the food itself.
• "Manufactured for" or "Distributed by" usually means someone else makes it.

Neither is automatically bad. A co-packed food from a careful brand can be fine. But a brand that owns its plants controls ingredient testing, sanitation, and recalls directly, which is why WSAVA asks about it.

What changed since 2022

If your sense of who owns what comes from before 2022, some of it is out of date:

Pet food ownership changes every year or two, so we update this table when a deal closes.

Does any of this matter for your dog?

Less than the label, more than nothing.

Ownership is useful in three situations. If a recall hits one brand, it tells you which sister brands might share a plant. If you want to stop buying from a particular company, it shows you which brands belong to it. And it helps you read marketing. A "small-batch, independent" story is harder to believe from a brand that a multinational bought years ago.

For choosing a food, the better questions are the five WSAVA asks of any manufacturer: a full-time qualified nutritionist, credentialed formulation, feeding trials, owned plants, and documented quality control. Our WSAVA brand scores score every brand we track. Then the food has to fit your dog's age, size, and health, which a parent company tells you nothing about.

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Related guides

• WSAVA-approved dog food: every brand scored
• Is Purina ONE WSAVA compliant? 8 more brands checked
• Hill's vs Royal Canin vs Purina Pro Plan
• Compare any two dog food brands