THE VET WHO MADE A MINT OUT OF DOG FOOD
How vet who started his business with £72 and a sack of rice is now worth £24m
THE Burns Pet Nutrition logo is probably something you’ve seen but never really registered whether you have a pet or not.
Yet that simple geometric pattern belongs to a brand which has created one of the richest people in Wales you have probably never heard of.
That person is 71-year-old John Burns, a man who has created a £24m dog food business from just £72 and a sack of brown rice.
On the day we meet he wants to be photographed with the dog. It is after all his trademark and how he made his fortune.
John speaks deliberately and concisely as he describes how an interest in first animal health and then human health in the 1970s translated into a multi-million-pound niche dog food business.
Originally from the west coast of Scotland just south of Glasgow, John arrived in Carmarthenshire in 1971 after qualifying as a vet.
His first job at a practice in Whitland was the first he was offered.
He thought he’d stay for just a year but 49 years later he is still in the county and calls Ferryside home.
As a young vet in the 1970s John could have been described as “alternative”. Even then he was eating brown rice for breakfast, long before it was being served up in hipster cafes.
“It was mainly large animals at Whitland but when I got back to the surgery in the afternoon the receptionist would say Mrs so-and-so wants to bring her dog down so we’d see the odd pet,” he explained. “But even at that stage I was seeing health problems in pets like itchy skin or ear problems.”
In those days antibiotics or drugs were seen as the answer but John used to say to his clients: “This isn’t really curing the problem, we don’t really know what’s causing it.” When the drugs finished the problem would come back again.
“I thought: ‘Well that’s not what veterinary science ought to be’, not for me anyhow,” John continues. “I read an article about acupuncture and thought that looked promising at solving recurring health problems.”
His interest was piqued, so much so that he left Whitland in 1976 and enrolled in a course on human acupuncture while working as a locum vet, which in turn led to interest in alternative medicine and nutrition. If it worked for humans then it would surely work for dogs, John reasoned.
He moved back to Llanelli and started telling clients in his practice that while he would treat their animal with drugs they needed to stop feeding their pet conventional pet food and start it on a wholemeal diet of brown rice, vegetables and meat in equal portions.
The difficult part, however, was convincing people that his approach was the right way to go. After a few years of trying to get his message across he realised the only way was to make the pet food himself.
Still it took another decade for John to work out how to manufacture the ideal pet food in a commercial way. Armed with his perfect formula, he criss-crossed the country looking for a manufacturer who would make the food for him. In 1993 he eventually found one in Llandovery.
“The incubation period of my business was not far off 20 years,” he chuckles. “I wish I’d done it earlier, perhaps, but it might not have been right back in the ’70s. People might not have been ready for it.”
The young John had no doubts about his enterprise: “I thought this was going to be big news, a vet making his own pet food,” he said.
With hindsight John is more realistic about his early endeavours. He spent just £72 on a box of plastic sacks and wasn’t fussed on colour.
“I didn’t have proper packaging – it just came in a plain polythene bag and I designed the leaflet and a label to go on that polythene bag,” he said. “So you can imagine what that looked like. It was a very unappealing appearance.”
The wholesalers told him no-one would buy it and he was advised to develop his local contacts instead. “It was the best piece of advice I ever received,” adds John.
He changed his ambitions and instead of rolling it out nationally he loaded up his car and went round to the local vets and pet shops.
From Neath to Pembroke Dock, the response was positive despite the makeshift bags. “Before I knew it I had a one-man business which was doing OK,” said John.
By now he had sold his vet practice and moved in to a bungalow in Kidwelly with his wife and their two young children.
“I had to make a go of it,” John said. “You can’t concentrate on one business while you’re doing another. I decided to concentrate full-time on the pet food business.
“Five or six months after I started up I can remember thinking: ‘You know, it’s just me, I’m working from home, I’m delivering food out of my car, I’m not employing anybody, I’m making a living and I don’t get called out at night; I’m doing all right here.’ I was making a living quite easily compared to working at a vet practice.”
The young family used to sit around the TV putting cupfuls of food in bags and sticking labels on. “I got the children on to it and they would earn some extra pocket money by sticking labels on bags,” said John. “They got three pence for every sample they filled.
From the initial two tonnes of dog food in 1993 production soon expanded to 20 tonnes and today around 1,000 tonnes are produced every week. The turning point was a two-page spread in the Dogs Today magazine, which kicked the business out of West Wales and into the national realm.
It took a year before John hired any extra help. Now he employs 110 people, including two vets in Ireland, and the dog food is exported internationally. Burns Pet Nutrition is worth £24m today.
“Somebody said to me this could be a monster but I didn’t really believe them,” he said. “If you’d said this could be a £20m business I would never have thought that could be conceivable. It’s only because I’ve grown with it that I’ve adapted and become used to that.
“I can remember in the early days working from home one day, a Sunday, I got my bank statement out and I looked through it and I totted how much money had been paid into my account in the month. It was something like £30,000 and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, I’m rich.’
“And then I got my cheque book out and started looking through that and realised I had written cheques totalling more than £30,000 that month so that was a sobering thought. It’s a huge amount of money being turned over and it’s just something I grew into really as the business grew.”
Over time he has reluctantly learned to delegate and said he doesn’t do much of the heavy lifting any more. “I do the thinking but the main running of the business is by other people,” he said.
He has five children and nine grandchildren. His family will continue to own the business even if they don’t become actively involved. But John has no thoughts of retiring just yet. “It’s a way of life as much as anything, it’s not just a job,” he adds.
Today, it’s the Burns Pet Nutrition Foundation which takes up as much of his thinking space as the business. Set up in 2007, it is basically a way of channelling money from the company and into the community, he said.
But equally it is another example of a sound business decision. “My hope is that Burns Pet Nutrition’s investment in community activities will raise the company’s profile and recognition through useful work rather than using conventional advertising and PR,” he explained.
Not that he doesn’t find the charitable arm of the business rewarding. “I’m in a position to be able to do that and use money I’ve made from the company for charitable activities I’ve set up,” he continues. “I find that very gratifying and satisfying to be able to do that.”
As part of that John started the Parc y Bocs Farm Shop on the outskirts of Kidwelly. What started out as a roadside honesty box to sell surplus eggs from the farm has flourished into an impressive farm shop, pet food outlet and a major community project.
John started selling eggs at the end of the lane after buying several hundred hens to lay eggs to go into his dog food. But the factory wasn’t ready and he had to find a way to get rid of the excess eggs. After setting up a little stall he soon found he was selling 1,500 eggs every week and someone started stealing the proceeds.
Today the swanky farm shop building also boasts a market garden and playground. The site is used for the company’s Better Tomorrow scheme where those who are disadvantaged or have learning difficulties can visit and undertake supervised projects.
There’s even a minibus which goes around collecting isolated people in the community and brings them together at the farm shop cafe.
Stood in the car park under a deep blue summer sky John couldn’t be further away from his early days as an eager vet, delivering calves by torchlight.
But decades later the lessons he learned in 1971 are as applicable as ever.
“People do love to spoil their pets by giving them treats and too much food,” he said.
“The biggest problem I see today is people overfeeding their pets. People want to indulge them, spoil them – that’s the human nature of having a pet. Many people give their pets too much food and not enough time. A real treat would be an extra walk.”
Although buying a bag of Burns Pet Nutrition probably won’t hurt them either.