A feed company, a cereal and a checkerboard.

Purina ONE belongs to a company whose story starts with farm feed. The Gale company history of Purina Mills, published in the International Directory of Company Histories, says the business began in 1894 as the Robinson-Danforth Commission Company, formed in St. Louis by George Robinson, Will Andrews and William Danforth to make horse and mule feed in a storefront near the riverfront. After a tornado destroyed the company’s mill in May 1896, Danforth borrowed to build a new one and, the history says, effectively became the company’s leader.

The name came from breakfast. In 1898 Danforth began selling a whole-wheat cereal to St. Louis grocers as Purina Whole Wheat Cereal, a name the Gale history derives from the company slogan “Where purity is paramount”. A promotion with a health writer known as Dr. Ralston renamed the cereal after him, and by 1902 the two names were familiar enough that the business became the Ralston Purina Company.

The same year brought the mark that still travels with the name. Gale says Danforth, looking for a way to make Purina products easy to spot, remembered a family from his childhood in Charleston, Missouri, who came to his father’s store each Saturday dressed in clothes cut from the same red-and-white checkerboard cloth, and put the pattern on his packaging. English Wikipedia dates the checkerboard trademark to 1902, citing a 1964 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article and the company’s own centenary history. Danforth wore checkerboard ties and jackets, set up a “Checker Gallery” of employees in checked clothes and an annual Checker Day, and the St. Louis headquarters became known as Checkerboard Square.

The other word in the Purina vocabulary arrived after the First World War. Gale says Danforth, serving as a YMCA secretary in France, noticed that soldiers called their rations “chow”, and on his return replaced “feed” with “chow” on all of Purina’s animal products. In the 1920s his son Donald Danforth pressed for a research facility, and the company established one near Gray Summit, Missouri; Donald took over the business when his father retired in 1932.

A 1980s line, a cat range and a new owner.

Purina ONE arrived as Ralston Purina was reshaping itself around pet food. The Gale history records that in 1986 the company sold Purina Mills, its farm-feed business, to British Petroleum, and that the sale did not include the pet food lines, which Ralston Purina kept. The checkerboard went both ways: Gale says both companies continued to use the trademark in the United States.

The company has given two launch years. An archived “About Purina ONE” page from 2007 says Purina ONE pet foods were launched in 1986. The history of the brand on Nestlé’s corporate site, as archived in 2024, dates the launch of Purina ONE dog food in the United States to 1987. The same Nestlé timeline says the line expanded in 1991 to include cat food and a range of life-stage and lifestyle products for cats and dogs.

Nestlé’s timeline sets out the brand’s later milestones. It dates the start of the Purina ONE challenge, a feeding campaign for pet owners, to 1997 and says the campaign was shortened in 2002. In 1998, it says, Purina ONE launched across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and other parts of Asia. Wet cat food under the name was introduced in Europe in 2006; a year later the canned dog food line Purina ONE Wholesome Entrées followed; wet cat food reached the United States in 2012; and the True Instinct line for dogs launched in the United States in 2013.

Ownership changed at the turn of the century. Forbes reported on 16 January 2001 that Nestlé had agreed to buy St. Louis-based Ralston Purina, maker of Puppy Chow, Dog Chow and Meow Mix, noting that Ralston also produced Purina One, and that Nestlé planned to merge its US Friskies business into Ralston’s organisation in St. Louis. English Wikipedia, citing the Associated Press, says Nestlé Purina PetCare was formed in December 2001 when the deal was completed, after the Federal Trade Commission cleared it once the Meow Mix and Alley Cat brands had been sold. Nestlé has owned Purina ONE since 2001, and the business is still headquartered in St. Louis.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all sell food for cats, dogs and other household pets. Pet food reaches its buyer through a small set of familiar formats: the printed paper or plastic bag of dry kibble, the steel or aluminium can of wet food, the foil pouch and the cardboard multipack, each stacked in long rows on a supermarket or pet-shop shelf where many rival names sit side by side.

On a crowded aisle, a pet-food brand’s identity is carried mostly by its pack. The front panel usually pairs a wordmark with a photograph or illustration of an animal, a band of colour that separates one recipe or life stage from another, and a short line naming the flavour. The same logo may be adapted for a tall bag, a squat can lid and a small pouch, so its shape, colour and lettering have to hold together at very different sizes and on different materials.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who owns it now, and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A capitalised word and two shelf colours.

The Purina ONE name is written with the second word in capitals, the styling used on the brand’s own pages and in Nestlé’s timeline, and it is carried under the Purina name of the company that adopted the checkerboard in 1902. The single word gave the line its slogan: the 2007 version of the brand’s website closed with “Purina ONE. ONE Can Make A Difference.”

Colour was part of the brand’s description of itself. The same archived 2007 page said Purina ONE was “distinguished on shelf by its burgundy or teal packaging”. Those two shelf colours, alongside the red and white of the checkerboard that Gale describes, are the starting point for the palette on this page; the exact shades are our own.

The checkerboard itself has a long public life outside the bag. English Wikipedia records that while Ralston Purina owned the St. Louis Blues hockey team, from 1977 to 1983, the St. Louis Arena was renamed the Checkerdome after the logo, and that a beginners’ area at the Keystone ski resort in Colorado, which the company bought in 1974, still carries the name Checkerboard Flats.

The name has stayed constant as the range changed. Nestlé’s timeline moves Purina ONE from dog food to cat food, from dry food to wet food and from the United States to Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Asia, with sub-ranges such as True Instinct added beneath the same capitalised word.

For a design guide, Purina ONE shows how a sub-brand can borrow a parent’s century-old checkerboard while claiming its own shelf colours and a single capitalised word. Compare it with Purina Pro Plan, the Ralston Purina line also owned by Nestlé since 2001, and Friskies, the Nestlé cat food that joined it in St. Louis in 2001. For this guide we use burgundy, teal and checker red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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