In 1951, annual sales reached £1m, and the company moved to Melton Mowbray. In 1953, the company operated seven days a week, twenty four hours a day on a shift system. A continuous sterilisation process was introduced instead of batch processing.
Due to making more than the Chappie product, the company name changed to Petfoods Ltd. In 1972, this became Pedigree Petfoods Ltd. A new factory on Shrewsbury Avenue in Woodston, Peterborough opened in October 1974 which originally produced semi-moist products such as Bounce.
In March 1975 it became the Pedigree Petfoods division of Mars Ltd. During the 1970s, around 2,500 workers were at Melton and 200 at Peterborough and produced around 400,000 tonnes of animal food a year and virtually doubled production.
The raw materials came from the Oakleigh Manufacturing Company in Ascot. Around 3 million cans were used per day at the Melton plant; cans were delivered every 30 minutes, to limit storage space, from the Metal Box company (which became Novar plc).
At this time, Whiskas was the company’s biggest product by sales closely followed by Pedigree Chum, although more in volume was sold of Pedigree Chum. Whiskas sold four times as much as Kitekat, although only half as much was spent on advertising Kitekat as Whiskas.
Towards the late 1980s and in the 1990s, the company came under much more competition from what became Nestlé Purina PetCare. A new £22m pouch production line opened in November 2007. The company is a member of the Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association