The seed company that started as a teenager's mail-order poultry venture in 1876 has a new corporate owner. W. Atlee Burpee Co., the Bucks County-based gardening institution that has shipped seeds to American backyards for 150 years, has been acquired by Central Garden & Pet Co., a Walnut Creek, California-based pet and garden supply conglomerate. The deal closed on September 30, though it was only announced Monday.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Burpee will operate as a separate entity and remain headquartered in Pennsylvania, with current leadership, including chief executive Jamie Mattikow, staying in place. Burpee is based in Bucks County and has operated in the Philadelphia area since Washington Atlee Burpee founded it in Philadelphia in 1876. The company still runs Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, the experimental grounds where generations of Burpee breeders have tested new varieties.
Central Garden & Pet, which has operated in the pet and garden industries for 45 years, already owns Pennington, Ferry-Morse and American Seed, and sells everything from pet foods and plant fertilizer to flea and tick control and aquarium products. The company reported net sales of $3.1 billion in fiscal year 2025 and employs more than 6,000 people, mostly in North America, according to the company. Central Garden & Pet trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbols CENT and CENTA, with an estimated market capitalization of $2.58 billion as of October 2026, per GuruFocus.
A Deal Decades in the Making
Central's leadership framed the acquisition as a natural fit. Niko Lahanas, chief executive officer of Central Garden & Pet, described Burpee as an iconic American brand with a 150-year legacy of innovation, quality and consumer trust, and said the company's customer relationships and digital capabilities make it a compelling addition to Central's garden portfolio. Jamie Mattikow said Central Garden & Pet values Burpee and can provide resources to accelerate growth and employee opportunities, adding that he and the Burpee team were excited about the news.
George Ball, the former owner and executive chair of Burpee who purchased the company in 1991, said he sought a strong steward for Burpee's legacy. It's not the brand's first brush with outside ownership — before Ball bought Burpee, the company had been acquired by conglomerate General Foods in the early 1970s before returning to private family ownership in 1988, according to Encyclopedia.com.
This isn't Central's first major seed acquisition, either. The company expanded its seed packet presence back in February 2021 by acquiring Green Garden Products, the company behind Ferry-Morse and American Seed, which ships over 250 million seed packets annually, according to a Central Garden & Pet press release. Burpee's purchase fits a long-running pattern for the company, which, per Umbrex Consulting, was founded in 1980 by William E. Brown and built its dual platform in pet care and lawn and garden supplies primarily through decades of brand acquisitions.
From Poultry Loan to Garden Empire
Burpee's own origin story is almost as unlikely as its latest chapter. Washington Atlee Burpee originally started the business in 1876 as a mail-order poultry and livestock enterprise, funded by a $1,000 loan from his mother, before pivoting to seeds after animal feed customers began requesting vegetable crop seeds, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. The company went on to adopt mail-order catalogs early and develop varieties that became household names, including iceberg lettuce, Big Boy tomatoes, Snowbird sugar snap peas and Golden Bantam sweet corn.
In 1888, Burpee bought a farm on New Britain Road in Doylestown and named it Fordhook, a property that served as the company's experimental garden for thousands of seed trials over the decades. Fordhook Farm covers 60 acres and opens to the public once a year. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in April 1987 and features 12 historic contributing structures, including a main fieldstone farmhouse built before 1798, according to the National Park Service.
Burpee's Business Keeps Growing
Today, Burpee sells live plants, soil, cages and other garden products available in big-box stores and online, alongside its headquarters in Warminster, Pennsylvania. Consumers spent $242 million on Burpee products in 2025, Mattikow said in a previous interview, with spending up 120% from 2019 to 2025.
That growth tracks with a broader surge in American gardening. Total U.S. lawn and garden spending reached a record $79.0 billion in 2025, up 13.5% from 2024, with average annual spending per active gardening household reaching $740, according to National Gardening Association data cited by Modern Sprout. Roughly 35% of U.S. households grow fruits, vegetables or herbs at home, per National Gardening Association survey findings cited by a gardening hand tools market report, while U.S. commercial horticulture operations generated $18.3 billion in total sales, according to USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service figures cited by Markntel Advisors.
Legal and financial advisors rounded out the deal's corporate details. Baker Botts represented buyer Central Garden & Pet, while William Blair served as financial advisor to Burpee alongside legal counsel Stradley Ronon, according to Investing.com. For now, the plan is continuity: a Bucks County name with a century and a half of history, still growing seeds under its own roof, just with a bigger corporate parent writing the checks.
