When Was Kibble Invented? The History of Dog Food and Why Raw Feeding Came Before It

Kibble, as Australian dog owners know it today, was invented in 1956. That is a remarkably short history for something that has become the default assumption of dog nutrition. For the entire preceding history of the domestic dog spanning at least 15,000 years, dogs ate raw meat, bones, organ meat, and whatever table scraps their owners had. The commercial pet food industry is less than 170 years old. The extrusion process that produces modern kibble is less than 70 years old. Understanding when kibble was invented, what drove its adoption, and what it replaced helps explain why the raw feeding movement is not a trend but a return to how dogs were fed before a post-war industrial food system reshaped the pet food market.

What dogs ate for 15,000 years before commercial food existed

The domestic dog diverged from the grey wolf at least 15,000 years ago, possibly earlier. For the vast majority of that history, dogs ate what their human companions ate, or what they could acquire on their own. In hunting societies, dogs received raw offcuts, organ meat, and bones from kills. In agricultural settlements, dogs received grain-based kitchen scraps and whatever small animals they caught. In pre-industrial Europe and colonial Australia, working dogs on farms ate raw offal from livestock slaughter, raw bones, and whatever was surplus from human food preparation.

None of this was nutritionally designed. But it shared one common feature that modern kibble does not: it was unprocessed, biologically appropriate for a carnivore, and free of the industrial grain surplus that would later become the primary ingredient in commercial pet food.

The biological digestive system of the dog did not change when kibble was invented in 1956. A dog's gastric pH of approximately 2 to 2.5, designed to efficiently process raw meat and bone, their short digestive transit time suited to a protein-fat diet, and their absence of the amylase enzyme in saliva that humans use to begin starch digestion, are all evidence of an animal whose digestive biology reflects thousands of years of raw and minimally processed food. See our why raw feeding guide for the full biological argument.

When was dog food first invented? The complete timeline

1860: The first commercial dog biscuit

The commercial dog food industry began in approximately 1860 when American businessman James Spratt, while visiting England, observed dogs eating hardtack biscuits discarded from ships at the London docks. Spratt saw a commercial opportunity and developed what he called Fibrine Dog Cakes: a biscuit made from wheat, vegetables, beetroot, and beef blood.

Spratt's product was marketed primarily to English country gentlemen for their sporting dogs. It was a premium, discretionary purchase for wealthy dog owners, not a mass-market staple. By the 1890s, a British company had acquired Spratt's formula and production began in the United States. Additional manufacturers began producing their own biscuit formulas through the early 1900s.

These early dog biscuits bore little resemblance to modern kibble. They were baked, not extruded. They were sold as a supplement to raw meat and scraps, not as a complete daily diet. The concept of commercial dog food as the sole nutritional source for a dog did not yet exist.

1908: Milk-Bones enter the market

The F.H. Bennett Biscuit Company began producing Milk-Bones in 1908, introducing a competing product to Spratt's biscuits in the American market. Milk-Bones were formulated as a dog treat and training reward. They are still sold today in essentially the same form, making them one of the most enduring products in pet food history.

1922: Canned dog food arrives

P.M. Chapel introduced Ken-L Ration in 1922, the first mass-market canned dog food in the United States. The primary ingredient was horsemeat, which was inexpensive and abundant following the post-World War I surplus of horses that were no longer needed for military or farm use as automobiles and tractors displaced them. Ken-L Ration was heavily advertised and became a significant commercial success.

Canned dog food had an important advantage over biscuits: it was palatable, convenient to serve, and required no preparation. It was the first commercial dog food product that began moving domestic dogs away from their historical reliance on table scraps and butcher's raw meat toward a purely manufactured product.

1926: Purina enters dog nutrition

Purina, already established as a major grain and animal feed company, established its first canine nutrition research centre in 1926 and launched its first dog food product that year. Purina Dog Chow was initially produced as small dry squares called "checkers" made from meat, wheat germ meal, buttermilk, cod liver oil, barley malt, and cereal grains. Purina's investment in canine nutrition research would prove decisive for the industry.

1941 to 1945: World War II transforms dry dog food

World War II fundamentally reshaped the pet food industry in a way that still influences what Australian dogs eat today. Metal rationing for the war effort made canned dog food difficult and then impossible to produce at scale. Pet food manufacturers were classified as non-essential and faced severe material restrictions. Many canned food companies closed or drastically reduced production.

In response, manufacturers shifted to dry formats using cereal grains, which required no metal cans and were available as wartime agricultural surplus. Women working in war industries had less time for preparing food and welcomed convenient formats. Dry meal dog food grew rapidly during this period not because it was nutritionally optimal but because it was manufacturable under wartime constraints.

The commercial convenience and low cost of grain-based dry pet food was a discovery that the industry would not walk back after the war ended.

1956 to 1957: When kibble was invented

Modern extruded kibble was invented by Purina in the mid-1950s. Purina developed the extrusion process for pet food, which forces a mixture of ground ingredients through a die under high pressure and temperature (125 to 150 degrees Celsius). The heat and pressure cause the starch component of the mixture to expand rapidly as it exits the die, producing the puffed, uniform nugget shape that defines modern kibble.

Purina's first extruded kibble in the Dog Chow format reached the US market by 1957. The extrusion process produced a dog food format with three characteristics that made it ideal for mass-market commercial distribution: it was extremely cheap to produce (allowing large quantities of inexpensive grain to be combined with a small proportion of meat and formed into a product that looked substantially like meat-based food); it had a shelf life of 12 to 24 months without refrigeration; and it could be produced in very large quantities at continuous processing rates.

The extrusion process had not been designed for dog food. It was an industrial grain processing technology adapted from cereal manufacturing. Its adoption by the pet food industry in the 1950s established the business model that dominates commercial dog food today: inexpensive grain as the primary ingredient, heat processing that allows preservation, and minimal real meat content achieving the appearance of a protein-rich product through synthetic fortification.

1969: The "complete and balanced" standard

The American Association of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) established the definition of "complete and balanced" pet food in 1969, formalising the concept that a commercial pet food could be a dog's sole nutritional source. This regulatory framework legitimised the kibble-only feeding approach and provided the industry with a quality claim that could be used in marketing. By this point, kibble had been on the market for approximately 13 years and was rapidly displacing raw and table scrap feeding as the default approach across the United States, UK, and Australia.

Why is dog food called kibble?

The word kibble predates commercial dog food by several decades. The Oxford English Dictionary traces "to kibble" to the early 19th century, meaning to grind or break grain into coarser pieces than flour. The term was used in the milling industry for coarsely ground cereal meal.

When extruded dry dog food became the dominant commercial format in the 1950s and 1960s, the pet food industry borrowed "kibble" from the grain processing vocabulary because the product was produced from kibbled (coarsely ground) grain as a primary ingredient. The extruded nugget was itself a processed form of kibbled grain. The term stuck across the English-speaking world and became the universal consumer description for dry extruded dog food, including in Australia where it entered common usage by the 1970s and 1980s as commercial dry dog food became mainstream.

The commercial incentives behind kibble's dominance

Kibble did not become the dominant dog food format because research showed it was nutritionally optimal for dogs. It became dominant because it was economically optimal for manufacturers and logistically convenient for consumers. Understanding this commercial history helps explain why the nutritional evidence points consistently in the opposite direction to what the pet food industry has told dog owners for 70 years.

The grain surplus problem

Post-World War II agriculture in the United States and Australia produced large surpluses of cereal grain. This surplus needed buyers. Pet food was one of the most efficient ways to convert low-value grain into high-margin packaged consumer products. The majority of a kibble's ingredients by weight (35 to 55% carbohydrate by dry matter in most commercial formulas) is cereal grain that costs a fraction of the meat it is combined with.

The shelf life advantage

A product that stores at room temperature for 12 to 24 months creates enormous commercial advantages over fresh or frozen food. No refrigerated supply chains. No spoilage losses. Distribution across remote and regional areas including rural and outback Australia with no cold chain infrastructure. Standard retail shelf placement alongside cereal and packaged goods rather than specialist pet food refrigeration units that most 1960s supermarkets did not have.

The marketing environment

Television advertising in the post-war period was perfectly suited to selling kibble. A simple, consistent product with universal appeal to a new generation of pet owners who had less time than their parents, less connection to agricultural food production, and more disposable income to spend on convenience. The pet food industry became one of the largest television advertising spenders in the 1950s through 1970s in both the United States and Australia, normalising kibble as the responsible, scientific, convenient choice for dog nutrition.

What the extrusion process actually does to dog food nutrition

The nutritional consequences of the extrusion process are what make kibble's dominance a nutritional problem, not just a historical curiosity.

At 125 to 150 degrees Celsius, the Maillard reaction occurs between amino acids and reducing sugars. The Maillard reaction reduces lysine bioavailability by chemically bonding it into compounds dogs cannot digest. Lysine is the most reactive essential amino acid and the one most damaged by heat processing. A 2023 peer-reviewed study found frozen raw food had a reactive lysine to total lysine ratio of 0.95 versus 0.91 for freeze-dried food: both formats preserve far more lysine than extrusion at 150 degrees Celsius.

Enzymes in raw ingredients are denatured at temperatures above 40 to 60 degrees Celsius. Kibble production destroys all naturally occurring enzyme activity, requiring synthetic enzyme supplementation or accepting the absence of the digestive enzyme assistance that naturally occurs in raw food.

Heat-sensitive vitamins including thiamine (B1), vitamin C, and some B vitamins are partially or fully destroyed by extrusion temperatures. Kibble manufacturers add synthetic vitamins after processing to replace what the heat destroys. This synthetic replacement does not fully replicate the bioavailability of naturally occurring vitamins in the whole-food matrix of raw ingredients.

Protein digestibility of extruded kibble averages 79.5% in peer-reviewed feeding trials. Raw food protein digestibility averages 99.3%. For every 100g of protein in a dog's food, kibble delivers approximately 79.5g to the dog's tissues. Raw food delivers approximately 99.3g. The difference is not trivial across a lifetime of feeding, particularly for senior dogs, growing puppies, and working dogs where protein delivery efficiency directly affects health outcomes. See our gut health guide and quality difference page for how this translates into measurable health differences.

When did raw feeding come back, and why?

Raw feeding as a movement in Australia and globally is often described as a trend, but it is more accurately described as a return. Dogs ate raw food for 15,000 years. The commercial kibble period covers the most recent 70 of those years. The raw feeding movement that began gaining mainstream traction in Australia from the 1990s onward was not inventing a new dietary approach: it was recovering an old one.

Australian veterinarian Dr Ian Billinghurst popularised the BARF (Biologically Appropriate Raw Food) concept in his 1993 book "Give Your Dog a Bone," which brought structured raw feeding methodology to Australian and international dog owners who were beginning to question the nutritional adequacy of commercial kibble. The book's publication coincided with growing pet owner awareness of ingredient quality in commercial pet food and the first wave of high-profile pet food recalls.

In the United States, Steve Brown pioneered commercially prepared raw dog food from the late 1990s. In Australia, Rogue Raw has been part of the raw feeding specialist supplier landscape for over a decade, providing human-grade, sulphite-free wild and free-range raw proteins to Australian dog owners who are returning their dogs to the diet that predates 70 years of industrial pet food history.

The question "when was kibble invented?" has a specific answer: 1956. The broader question it implies, "what were dogs supposed to eat?", has an answer that covers 15,000 years of dietary history before that date. Our complete raw feeding guide, common mistakes guide, and feeding calculator are the starting point for any Australian dog owner ready to make the change. See the Rogue Raw meal plans and full raw food range for everything needed to start.

Frequently asked questions: when was kibble invented?

Kibble was invented in 1956 and became dominant over the following three decades for reasons that had more to do with commercial logistics than canine nutrition. Understanding this history does not require rejecting everything the commercial pet food industry has learned about nutrition. It does require recognising that 70 years of industrial pet food is a very small window in the dietary history of a species that evolved over 15,000 years on an entirely different diet. Start with the Primal Venison as the lean, novel, first raw protein, use the feeding calculator for your dog's daily amounts, and browse the full Rogue Raw range to build a rotation that returns your dog to what dogs were eating long before 1956.