A small can with a dinner-party name.

Fancy Feast was introduced by the Carnation Company in 1982. English Wikipedia says it first appeared in 3-ounce cans of wet food in seven varieties, and Purina’s own regional website for the brand says “since 1982, Fancy Feast has set the standard in gourmet cat food,” which we give as the company’s description. Wikipedia’s history of Friskies, citing a Nestlé USA brand timeline, also records Fancy Feast as a sister brand produced in 1982.

The brand came out of a company that had been making pet food since the 1930s. Carnation, the milk company, had introduced Friskies as a dry dog food in the 1930s, added Little Friskies for cats in 1956 and, from the late 1950s, moved into canned cat food, which it renamed Friskies Buffet in 1967 after research suggested that shoppers wanted single servings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Wikipedia says, Carnation added lines in what the trade called the “gourmet” category, among them Bright Eyes and Chef’s Blend.

The positioning was set out in the first advertising. Wikipedia quotes the original commercial, in which an announcer asked whether a cat gave its owner the cold shoulder when served cold, leftover cat food, and told viewers to “watch it warm up to Fancy Feast.” The spot also introduced the brand’s best-remembered character, a white Persian cat whose thoughts the audience could hear. The first slogan Wikipedia lists for the brand, from the same year, is a question addressed to that cat: “Fancy Feast, darling?”

Carnation, Nestlé and Purina.

Fancy Feast changed hands three years after it was launched. In 1985, Wikipedia records, Nestlé bought Carnation, and with it Friskies, Fancy Feast and Carnation’s other pet foods. Inside Nestlé the pet-food business was renamed Nestlé/Carnation Food Company and in 1992 became a separate subsidiary, the Friskies PetCare Company. Wikipedia lists Fancy Feast’s owners accordingly: Carnation from 1982 to 1985, and the Friskies PetCare Company from 1985 to 2001.

The next change came in 2001. In January that year Nestlé and its American rival Ralston Purina announced a merger agreement, and the two pet-food businesses were combined as Nestlé Purina PetCare, based in St. Louis, Missouri, where Ralston Purina had its headquarters. Fancy Feast has been part of Nestlé Purina PetCare since 2001, alongside Friskies, Purina Pro Plan, Cat Chow and the dog brands that came from Ralston Purina. Nestlé has owned the brand since 1985.

Through those changes the brand kept its slogan for a long time. Wikipedia lists “A moist and delicious meal in every can” for 1982 to 1984 and “Good taste is easy to recognize” from 1982 to 2005, citing commercials from 1988 and 1996 that use the line. It was followed by “Is it love, or is it Fancy Feast?” from 2005 to 2008 and, from 2010, “The best ingredient is love.” The last of these appears in a 2013 television spot called “Mornings,” in which a woman wakes to a purring cat that follows her to the kitchen, as recorded by the advertising database iSpot.tv.

The range has widened under Purina. Wikipedia groups the wet foods into families with names such as Classic, Marinated Morsels, Roasted, Flaked and Chunky, and lists a separate “Select” range sold only in China. Each family keeps the same naming habit: almost every variety ends in the word “Feast,” so that a can of chicken becomes a Chicken Feast and a tin of tuna and mackerel becomes a Flaked Tuna and Mackerel Feast.

Design and documentation.

The eight brands in this group are all dog and cat food or treat names. Pet-food brands sit at many different points in the trade, from companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food or confectionery groups, and a single brand may be sold under more than one name in different countries.

A pet-food brand’s identity is carried mostly by its bag, can or pouch: the name set large, a photograph or drawing of an animal, a few strong colours that make a range easy to sort on a shelf, and sometimes a mascot or a jingle remembered from television. Because the company behind the name may have changed hands several times, the questions behind each name are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packs and advertising have changed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its origins, its owners over time and its advertising — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Persian cat, a menu and the word “Feast.”

Fancy Feast’s identity has been built from words as much as from pictures. The name itself does most of the work: “fancy” for the occasion and “feast” for the meal. The brand repeats the second word in almost every product name, so the range reads like a menu of dishes rather than a list of flavours, and the families — Marinated Morsels, Roasted, Flaked — borrow the vocabulary of a restaurant kitchen.

The other constant is the cat. From the first commercial in 1982, Wikipedia says, the brand used a white Persian cat and let viewers hear what she was thinking. The slogans that followed spoke to the owner in the same tone of a host offering dinner to a guest: “Fancy Feast, darling?” in 1982, then “Good taste is easy to recognize,” a line that ran, according to Wikipedia’s list, until 2005, and later “Is it love, or is it Fancy Feast?”.

The later advertising moved the emphasis from luxury to affection. “The best ingredient is love,” the slogan Wikipedia lists from 2010, frames the food as something an owner gives rather than something a discerning cat demands, and the 2013 “Mornings” spot recorded by iSpot.tv shows the daily routine of feeding rather than a formal dinner. The change of tone kept the core idea — that feeding a cat can be treated as a small occasion — while bringing the owner into the picture.

The brand also sits inside a larger family at Nestlé Purina. Its sister brand Friskies, which Carnation had built up since the 1930s, has used a cartoon cat and, more recently, cats already famous online; Fancy Feast has stayed with the Persian cat and the vocabulary of the dinner table.

For a design guide, Fancy Feast shows how a name, a single animal and a consistent tone of voice can position an everyday product as an indulgence without changing what it is. Compare it with Friskies, the Carnation sister brand whose advertising took a playful route, and Whiskas, the cat-food brand owned by Mars. For this guide we use dinner plum and gilt gold on Persian white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Fancy Feast’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.