[Britster]

Originally Posted by gemy

I found Brits history lesson on how the pet food industry evolved to be interesting and informative.

Here is the whole thing:

In the late 1850s, a young electrician from Cincinnati named James Spratt went to London to sell lightning rods. When his ship arrived, crew members threw the leftover “ships biscuits” onto the dock, where they were devoured by hordes of waiting dogs.

Spratt had the idea that he could make cheap, easy-to-serve biscuits and sell them to the growing number of urban dog owners. His recipe was a baked mixture of wheat, beet root and vegetables bound together with beef blood. When Spratt’s Patent Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes came on the market in 1860, the pet-food industry was born. In 1870 he took the business to New York and began the American pet food industry.

In 1908 the F.H. Bennet Biscuit company opened, making biscuits shaped like bones, and also made the first puppy food, and was the first to package different-sized kibble.

In 1922 Chappel Brothers of Rockford, IL, introduced Ken-L Ration, the first canned dog food in the United States. It was horse meat. Ken-L Ration became such a success that by the mid-1930s they were breeding horses just for dog food and slaughtering 50,000 of them a year.

In 1931 The National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) bought Bennett’s company and renamed the biscuits Milkbones. They hired 3,000 salesmen with the specific goal of getting Milkbones into food stores — and into national consciousness. For the first time, dog biscuits were part of regular grocery shopping.

By 1941 canned dog food had a 90% share of the market … until the United States entered World War II and the government started rationing tin and meat. Then dry dog food became popular again (the biscuits where considered dry dog food).

In 1950 the Ralston Purina Company started using a cooking extruder to make their Chex cereal. Ingredients were pushed through a tube, cooked under high pressure, and puffed up with air. This allowed Chex to stay crisp in milk.

At about the same time, manufacturers were getting complaints about the appearance, texture and digestibility of dry dog food. Purina’s pet food division borrowed an extruder from the cereal division and experimented with it in secret for three years. The result: Purina Dog Chow.

In 1964 the Pet Food Institute, a lobbying group for the now-gigantic pet food industry, began a campaign to get people to stop feeding their dogs anything but packaged dog food. They funded “reports” that appeared in magazines, detailing the benefits of processed dog food and even produced a radio spot about “the dangers of table scraps.”

The dog food industry was spending an incredible $50 million a year advertising. In the 1960s and 1970s, factors such as increased numbers of breeds and rising crime rates made dog ownership skyrocket. By 1975 there were more than 1,500 dog foods on the market.

Today, more than 1,600 square miles of soybeans, 2,100 square miles of corn, and 1.7 million tons of meat and poultry products are made into pet food every year. There are more than 65 million dogs in the US and pet food is an $11 billion industry … and growing.