A milk company tries dog food.

Friskies began as a dog food made by a milk company. The Carnation Company, known for its condensed and dried milk, introduced the brand through its subsidiary, the Albers Company, English Wikipedia says, citing the Encyclopedia of Consumer Brands (1994). Sources give two dates for the start. Adweek, in a 2011 article by Robert Klara, says Carnation diversified into Friskies in 1930, at a time when it was struggling to sell condensed milk; Wikipedia, citing Carnation’s own 1974 company history and the International Directory of Company Histories, dates the launch of the dry dog food to 1934.

Carnation had more than milk to draw on. Wikipedia notes that the company also processed animal feed for farms, and that it tested dry food for three and a half years at Carnation Farms, first with stray dogs and later with pure-bred dogs in a formal kennel. The first product was Friskies Cubes; pellets called Friskies Meal followed eight years later.

For its first years Friskies was sold only as dry food. Wikipedia gives two reasons: during the Great Depression shoppers preferred cheaper products, and during the Second World War tin was rationed to save metal for the war effort, which limited competitors who sold pet food in cans. The brand sold well on the west coast of the United States and was then distributed increasingly in the east. The first Friskies canned dog food followed in 1951.

The brand’s first public faces came early. Wikipedia names Father Bernard Hubbard, a lecturer known as “The Glacier Priest” for his travels in Alaska, and one of his sled dogs, Katmai, as the first Friskies spokesperson and spokes-pet in the mid-1930s.

From the dog bowl to the cat bowl.

The move to cats began with a product that failed. In the early 1950s, Wikipedia says, Carnation introduced a series of specialty dog foods under the Friskies name, including one meant for puppies and cats; according to the Encyclopedia of Consumer Brands, “it was soon discovered that cats disliked the new ‘puppy food.’” A sales manager, Henry Arnest, argued for a food made for cats alone, an idea he later recalled the company thinking “nutty.” He persuaded Friskies executives to hold a market trial on the west coast in 1956. The product was named Little Friskies for Cats, and Adweek also dates its introduction to 1956.

Little Friskies was promoted with a cartoon cat as its mascot, and advertised on television, in newspapers and through Friskies Research Digest, a publication the company produced for veterinarians and animal breeders. Canned cat foods were test-marketed in 1958 and, after a Carnation report found that shoppers wanted single-serving portions, were renamed Friskies Buffet in 1967.

The family of brands grew around the name. Wikipedia records the gourmet lines Bright Eyes and Chef’s Blend in the 1970s and 1980s, the sister brand Mighty Dog in 1973 and another sister brand, Fancy Feast, in 1982. Dry and wet foods for kittens followed in 1988 and 1989. Carnation International, formed in 1966, took Carnation’s pet foods to markets that, Wikipedia says, included Japan, Spain, France, England and Italy.

Ownership then changed twice. Nestlé acquired Carnation in 1985. The business was renamed Nestlé/Carnation Food Company and in 1992 became a Nestlé subsidiary called the Friskies PetCare Company; in 1990 the Los Angeles Times listed Friskies pet food under Nestlé USA’s Carnation division. In January 2001 Nestlé and its rival Ralston Purina announced a merger agreement, and the two pet-food businesses were combined that year as Nestlé Purina PetCare, based in St. Louis, Missouri. Nestlé has owned Friskies since 1985, and Nestlé Purina PetCare has run it since 2001.

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 cartoon cat, a slogan and a cast of internet cats.

Friskies’ identity has been carried less by a single emblem than by the animals it puts in front of the camera. In the 1950s that was the cartoon cat used for Little Friskies; in the 2010s it was a cast of real cats already famous online. Wikipedia lists the brand’s taglines as “Friskies For More” (2004–2007), “Feed The Senses” (2007–2018) and “Feed Their Fantasy” (from 2018), and records that the brand was relaunched with new packaging in 2003. Adweek’s 2011 article describes a Tasty Treasures commercial of that year in which a cat conducts a “symphony” of flavours that will “feed the senses.”

From 2011, Friskies developed games for cats to play on touch-screen tablets, such as Cat Fishing and JitterBug, in which the animal chases targets across the screen, CNN reported in 2015. In 2013 the brand signed Grumpy Cat, the internet celebrity cat also called Tardar Sauce, as a spokescat, CNN Money reported, after the cat had appeared on the Friskies YouTube game show “Will Kitty Play With It?”. The same year, Adweek reported on 1 March 2013, Friskies released a series of films featuring Henri, le Chat Noir, the existential cat of online video, on the subject of “cat food boredom.”

The approach continued. Wikipedia describes reaction videos of cats made with the Fine Bros. in 2014, a list called “The Friskies 50” ranking cats by their online audience, and a bacon-and-cat themed art gallery at South by Southwest in 2015, built partly from Friskies products. In 2016 Friskies worked with BuzzFeed on “Dear Kitten,” videos in which an older cat explains house life to a younger one, and a sixty-second spot based on the series ran during the Super Bowl.

For a design guide, Friskies shows how a mass-market pet brand can keep its name fresh by casting rather than redrawing, letting characters — drawn, filmed or borrowed from the internet — carry the voice. Compare it with Fancy Feast, the gourmet sister brand Carnation launched in 1982, and Purina Pro Plan, which joined it under Nestlé Purina in 2001. For this guide we use bowl red and kibble gold on milk white with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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