A bone-shaped biscuit from a Lower East Side bakery.

Milk-Bone began in 1908 at a bakery on New York’s Lower East Side owned by the F.H. Bennett Biscuit Company, English Wikipedia says, citing Pet Food Industry in 2007. The first product was not called Milk-Bone. It was sold as Maltoid, a biscuit shaped like a bone and made with meat products, cereals, milk and liver oil, according to the same article.

The name changed some time between 1915 and 1926, English Wikipedia says, when the biscuit was renamed Milk-Bone because of its cow’s-milk content. The company’s website today heads its home page “Loved Since 1908.”

In 1931 the National Biscuit Company — later Nabisco — bought the Bennett bakery. Milk-Bone was the one Bennett product it kept, English Wikipedia says; a history of Buffalo’s Milk-Bone plant, quoting Buffalo Business First, gives the same year and says the Bennett company had made and packaged Milk-Bone since 1908.

English Wikipedia says a Milk-Bone box appears in the 1924 silent film The Tomboy, and that Disney’s 1939 cartoon Mickey’s Surprise Party, made for Nabisco, shows a box of the biscuits.

A Nabisco factory turned over to dog biscuits.

Milk-Bone’s home for most of its history has been Buffalo, New York. The plant there opened in 1922 as part of the National Biscuit Company and was shut down in 1955 and reconfigured to make Milk-Bone two years later, Buffalo Business First reported in a history quoted by the local preservation register Preservation Ready. The State of New York put the same date on it in August 2025, when Governor Kathy Hochul’s office described Milk-Bone as a major employer on Buffalo’s East Side since 1957.

That August 2025 announcement concerned a renovation of the Urban Street plant, which the state described as The J.M. Smucker Co.’s Milk-Bone manufacturing facility. The work adds a production line, with an oven, a grinder and a cooker, according to the governor’s office. Hope Knight of Empire State Development said Milk-Bone treats had been produced in Buffalo for “nearly 70 years.” English Wikipedia also says the biscuits sold in the United States are made in Buffalo, citing Pet Food Industry and the Buffalo broadcaster WGRZ in 2007.

The range has grown well beyond the original biscuit. The brand’s website lists the Original biscuits alongside MaroSnacks, Mini’s, Soft & Chewy treats, Pill Pouches, Comfort Chews and Flavor Rolls, as well as flavoured biscuits in peanut butter, chicken, beef and bacon. One line carries the name of a sister brand: Milk-Bone X Jif treats, named after the peanut butter that Jif also sells under Smucker ownership. The site also runs seasonal autumn ranges, with Halloween-themed biscuits.

English Wikipedia says the brand added flavours such as chicken and beef over the decades, and that its marketing gradually moved beyond simply selling a treat.

Dog treats and the companies behind them.

The seven brands in this group are all dog treat names: Greenies, Zuke’s, Milk-Bone, Dentastix, Beggin’, WHIMZEES and Pet Munchies. Dog treat brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from founder-run businesses that began with a single recipe to names that now belong to much larger pet food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a veterinary practice or an online shop.

A dog treat brand’s identity is usually carried less by the treat itself than by a pack, a name and a character or colour that owners learn to recognise, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its treats are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its treats are made and how its packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Nabisco to Kraft, Del Monte and Smucker.

Since its move to Buffalo, Milk-Bone has changed owners several times. It stayed within Nabisco through that company’s own changes of ownership and, by the 2000s, belonged to Kraft Foods. In 2006 Kraft sold a group of pet-product assets including the Milk-Bone brand to Del Monte Foods, which announced the purchase as complete in July that year, FoodIngredientsFirst reported. In 2014 Del Monte sold its consumer-products business to Del Monte Pacific and renamed the remaining pet business Big Heart Pet Brands, English Wikipedia says, citing Business Wire.

The J.M. Smucker Co., of Orrville, Ohio, announced an agreement to buy Big Heart Pet Brands on 3 February 2015 and completed the purchase on 23 March 2015, the company said at the time. Its announcement listed Milk-Bone among Big Heart’s brands, alongside Meow Mix, Kibbles ’n Bits, 9Lives, Natural Balance, Pup-Peroni, Gravy Train, Nature’s Recipe, Canine Carry Outs and Milo’s Kitchen. Big Heart’s chief executive, Dave West, joined Smucker as president of the pet food and snacks business.

Smucker has owned Milk-Bone since 2015. In February 2023 it agreed to sell several of those pet brands — Rachael Ray Nutrish, 9Lives, Kibbles ’n Bits, Nature’s Recipe and Gravy Train, with its private-label pet food — to Post Holdings of St. Louis, and it completed that sale on 28 April 2023. Milk-Bone was not part of it. Announcing the deal, Smucker’s chief executive, Mark Smucker, said the company’s pet business would focus on dog snacks and cat food, “anchored by our Milk-Bone and Meow Mix brands, respectively.” The Milk-Bone website’s footer names Big Heart Pet, Inc. as the owner of its marks, and New York State describes Big Heart Pet Brands as a Smucker subsidiary.

For a design guide, Milk-Bone shows how a product shape can become a brand mark: the bone shape has outlasted its first name and a series of owners. Compare Smucker’s, the Orrville company that owns it today, and Dentastix, a dog-treat line from Mars. For this guide we use biscuit red, bone cream and oven brown with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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