GA Pet Food

GA Pet Food’s story starts with Roger, whose father Tom ran what was then Lancashire’s largest arable farm. When Roger took over working the land, he realized the family couldn’t keep growing cereal crops without a more secure market for it, or they risked losing the five employees the farm supported. His answer, in 1992, was to buy a tractor-driver extruder and turn the family’s own wheat into a simple extruded dog food, and that’s what became Golden Acres, incorporated the following year in 1993 (Companies House records show 1996).

The business grew steadily from there. By 1995 it had added Wenger extrusion equipment, and by 2000 it was manufacturing 500 different types of extruded pet food, selling to 350 partners. In 2007, the company renamed itself GA Pet Food Partners, a shift meant to reflect what it had actually become: a manufacturing partner for other brands rather than one with products of its own. Unlike most pet food manufacturers, GA has never built a branded product line, positioning itself purely as the people behind other companies’ pet food, whether that’s a multinational or someone launching their first bag.

Investment kept pace with that growth. In 2012, GA commissioned the world’s only Wenger Thermal Twin 3630 extruder, a piece of equipment that let the company manufacture pet food using unusually high levels of fresh meat rather than dry meat meal. That groundwork led to the company’s biggest innovation yet: Freshtrusion, launched in 2014, is a world-first in dry pet food technology that eventually allowed GA to include up to 80% fresh meat in its formulas, a level the company says no other producer in the world can match. A £100 million Ingredients Kitchen followed, officially opened in May 2022.

Today, GA Pet Food Partners remains privately and family-owned, now employing more than 650 people and producing over 80,000 tonnes of dry extruded pet food a year, exported to 50 countries and sold through more than 1,600 partner brands worldwide. The company still runs out of Lancashire, not far from the farm where Roger first mixed wheat into dog food more than three decades ago, and still says its three dedicated pet nutritionists put the health and happiness of the animal being fed above everything else in how a formula gets built.