A Bumper Year for Burns Awards

At Burns, we are bucking the trend of economic downturn and celebrating a clutch of national awards for our natural pet food. As the Burns business continues to grow, despite the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic and as a family business based in West Wales, we scooped four prestigious awards placing us amongst major corporate competitors. In early July, the first-ever Which? Magazine Consumers Association dog food brand survey saw our brand come out on top in the poll of 2,594 members. The survey highlighted Which? members’ favourite pet food brands, ranked by customer response. Burns dog food impressed with an incredible 92% customer score, coming first out of 24 dog food brands and beating multinational and private equity-owned brands to the top spot. This consumer recognition has been followed up with Burns being named Best Natural Pet Food Brand 2020 – UK in the Lux Life Pet and Product Services awards this month (August 2020) which recognises excellence for high-end, luxury brands, as well as being recognised by Your Dog magazine in its Readers Product Awards 2020, winning Best Dry Complete Food for its Burns Original range. The Burns Pet Nutrition ethos is based on premium natural pet food with high quality ingredients. Our company was founded in 1993 by veterinary surgeon John Burns, who started out the firm with just simple sacks of brown rice sold at his surgery in West Wales. His philosophy was always to create a commercially available pet food modelled on a natural homecooked diet to help alleviate many of the common ailments seen at his surgery. At Burns Pet Nutrition, we now have a turnover of around £24 million with over 130 employees – the majority are employed in Carmarthenshire – and our natural pet food products are stocked across the UK and internationally. Our firm remains a firmly Welsh, family business with John Burns at the helm, despite regular buy out approaches from major corporations. In a fourth award, Burns was named runner up in The Family Business of the Year Awards 2020, organised by Family Business United, the family business champions, which seeks to recognise and celebrate the contribution that family firms make to the UK economy. Voted for by the public, with over 14,000 votes cast, the awards showcase the vital role family businesses play in the UK economy and in communities. The family theme here at Burns is set to increase as son Ciaran joins the company as an Environmental consultant, joining son Leon and daughter Amy who has been part of the Community team. Leon, who recently completed an MBA, is stepping up to work on Burns’ company business projects There are also non-Burns family members working for our community-focused company The John Burns Foundation, where it is not unusual to find fathers and sons, mothers and daughters and cousins working alongside each other in different departments.