Prime100 acquired by Colgate-Palmolive

I posted a story question box on Instagram the other day when the news broke that Colgate-Palmolive had acquired Aussie fresh(ish) pet food empire Prime100, to get a feel for what people in the game thought about it. To say the responses were negative would be putting it lightly. There wasn’t a single positive comment, with the closest sentiment being “if they keep it the same, I guess it’s fine,” which is far from a glowing endorsement of the deal.

So – what’s happening? And why is big toothpaste getting into pet?

Colgate-Palmolive are indeed most famous for their dental and personal hygiene products, but they’re also the corporate giant behind Hill’s Pet Nutrition, one of the ‘Big 3’ in processed pet food. The other two that make up this Bermuda triangle of mediocrity are the confectionary companies Mars, masquerading as Royal Canin, and Nestle, aka Purina.

One key point of difference between them is that Mars and Nestle both have a barrage of other brands under their umbrellas, from Pedigree to Eukanuba and almost everything in between, whereas Colgate-Palmolive have previously focused their efforts solely on the Hills’ Science Diet and Prescription ranges, investing big in infiltrating the veterinary sector. 

This is one thing that I think makes their recently announced acquisition of Prime100 interesting at face value – but it actually makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Prime100 is well aligned with the Hill’s ethos of relying on ‘experts’ to market their products, since Prime100 is already the preferred ‘prescription’ food of more progressive vets.

This has been the strategy of Hill’s forever, a model they admit was based on the raging success of getting dentists to endorse Colgate toothpaste. And while it may seem like a harmless strategy – toothpaste is objectively good, so surely vets would never endorse a food that isn’t also good – it’s important to remember that once upon a time, these were mainstream advertisements for cigarettes:

And that’s not to put the responsibility for these dangerous messages onto the health professionals supposedly espousing them – most of them had been duped by dodgy research and enticed with free products, at a time when there was scant concrete evidence that cigarettes were responsible for the raft of health problems smokers were experiencing.

RJ Reynolds of Camels cigarettes went so far as to create a 'Medical Relations Division' to produce research that formed the basis of their cigarette health claims strategy. This is not dissimilar to the way the sugar industry secretly funded research in the 1960s and 70s (at Harvard University, no less) through its ‘Sugar Research Foundation’ to demonise fat as the primary cause of heart disease in order to influence policy and protect its market share, and how the pharmaceutical industry aggressively lobbied doctors to overprescribe opiates, while the opioid crisis still rages and the FDA continues to approve more opiates based on deeply flawed clinical trial research. 

If you think this is heading down the rabbit hole, fear not. I sit on the opposite end of the socio-political spectrum to the average anti-vaxxer, but I think this pattern of marketing malevolence raises serious questions about the practice of corporate entities infiltrating (or creating) seemingly independent organisations, to covertly market their products under the guise of education and innovations in science and health, influencing both public and professional perceptions, and policy.

And there are few industries who do this better than big pet does it. 

This is the other thing that I think makes the acquisition of Prime100 by Hill’s Pet Nutrition interesting; Hill’s Pet Nutrition has, as an organisation, spent the last 50 years demonising fresh pet food in every form, at every opportunity. They do this largely by pouring buckets of money into favourable clinical research, seemingly independent associations that endorse their products, and by targeting the veterinary industry at the source: universities. 

These corporate sponsorship arrangements are ubiquitous in Australia and overseas, providing everything from student orientation lunches to clinical nutrition lectures to free food in teaching hospitals, and in return they are afforded the opportunity to influence a cult like loyalty to their products. Hill's even went so far as to create and fully fund a non-profit association called The Mark Morris Institute, which publishes the main nutrition textbook used by veterinary schools globally, Small Animal Clinical Nutrition (Mark Morris was the original founder of Hill’s Pet Nutrition). 

But don’t take my word (and redacted screenshots) for it, Colgate’s own senior vice-president of global marketing and sales told the Wall Street Journal in 1997 “the bulk of our expenditure goes to the veterinary community,” adding ominously, a decade before the opioid crisis began, “it’s just like taking drugs; you go to the doctor and he prescribes something and you don’t much question what the doctor says.”  

On the surface, it might seem like a progressive, if not somewhat hypocritical move by Hill’s to acquire Prime100 – an acknowledgement that the demand for minimally processed, high-quality pet nutrition products is growing, and if they don’t keep up they’re going to get left behind. And no doubt that’s a big part of it. But does that still describe Prime100? And what does that mean for fresh pet food more broadly?

The Prime100 of 2025 is a very different business to the Prime100 that burst onto the scene a little over a decade ago, or even the Prime100 of 5 years ago. Long before Colgate entered the picture, in the trenches of 2021, the majority stake in Prime100 was sold to Quadrant, an Australian private equity firm. Their modus operandi is to buy out owner operators and inject growth capital, scale businesses quickly and increase profits, then they may or may not offload them a few years later (often to an international buyer) for a payout in the hundreds of millions. At least that’s exactly what they did when they bought The Real Pet Food Company for $410 million in 2015, selling it a mere 2 years later for a cool billion. Not bad for a couple of years’ work.

Owners of these small business success stories are always demonised for 'selling out' when they decide they don’t want to run their business forever and would rather enjoy the fruits of their labour, but the reality is that these businesses weren't sold directly to shady Chinese investors by greedy founders; they were sold to an Australian firm that no doubt promised to take their passion project to unimaginable heights, while making them a handsome return for their years of hard work, with no more of the stress of running an increasingly complex enterprise. 

I’m not absolving the founders who sell their businesses to private equity of all responsibility for the inevitable decline in their products; I have no doubt they knew it was eventually coming, and they made a choice. But that’s also because on a personal level, I don’t agree with the idea that we should be rewarding people with more money than they could ever spend for any amount of hard work. The inevitable consequence of doing this is that these businesses are no longer being valued based on what they create and bring to the world, but purely on how much money they can generate for their shareholders by doing it.

Over the last few years, Prime100’s recipes have changed in ways that appear to me to be obvious cost saving measures, while simultaneously there has been a broader shift away from the ‘real food’ ethos they made their name for, towards a heavy focus on single protein diets and more ‘traditional’ pet food products, like their ‘slow cooked’ range. They no longer make the raw food patties that were once available at my local IGA, and their raw bites are an exclusive line for Petbarn. Interestingly, they also no longer make kibble, which is the product their new parent company is best known for.  

All any of that really proves is it’s unsurprisingly to hear that Prime100 has been sold to a multinational corporation with a focus on profits, rather than nutrition, because they’ve been priming for this for years. And I don’t even need to prove it; the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Colgate said in the press release announcing the deal that they are “excited that this acquisition will add a high-growth, profitable fresh dog food asset to the Hill’s division portfolio with the opportunity to drive continued growth through expanded distribution and awareness.” 

I don’t think this is problematic because I’m concerned the quality of Prime100's products will decline; I think that ship has sailed. I think it’s problematic for the same reason that a block of chocolate now costs nearly ten dollars at the supermarket in Australia; eliminating competition leads to monopolies. When a handful of companies dominate any industry, as a consumer, you lose. Prices go up, innovation stagnates, markets homogenise and our corporate overlords continue to dictate the status quo that benefits them the most.

In the case of Prime100, we may see more exposure to ‘fresh’ foods on the shelf or in the vet clinic – but Hill’s now defines what ‘fresh’ means.

This is not to put the blame squarely at the feet of Prime100 – far from it. Good on ‘em, small business is hard, I’m not here to judge them personally. This is a systemic problem that ultimately comes down to corporate greed, and it’s sadly far from unique to the pet food industry. If you want to combat these global ‘consumer product’ behemoths swallowing successful small businesses that are at the forefront of innovation and integrity, buy from the remaining small businesses whenever you can.  

I know it’s not easy, but it truly is the only way to ensure we maintain the small but mighty niche of independent pet products in Australia. You can support us here.