Attributed to a Microsoft exec in the 80s: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/eat-your-own-dog-food-how-micr...
In 2015, Marc Andreessen memorably said of Mixpanel's success at product-led growth: "The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-adva...
That then led to the idea of "eating your own dog food", because if even you won't eat it, what credibility do you have saying that the other dogs will?
Without being able to cite a specific TV ad or other urban legend sort of baseline, it clearly communicated that you hold yourself and your products to a higher standard. As a dog-food producer, you don't just meet the minimum requirements for legal sales, but you make it well enough to be fit for human consumption too.
It's in the same category as someone demonstrating that they could safely drink or breathe byproducts of some other industrial process. And, ironically, there was also a widely understood corollary that we could expect PR types to do something like this while secretly fearing that it would actually harm them.
I must admit, however, that the title of this article was too crass for me. I came very close to not reading it at all just because of the title. In my opinion, the article would be better served by something else, but I'm just not a big fan of bathroom humor in general.
Interesting perspective. I watch a YouTube channel of a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog, and even feeds his dog from the skillet where he cooked the meal. Many practical reasons for that but also the dog being the main tool in hunting and getting that food in the first place.
> "a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog"
The youtube channel you describe is showing a dog being fed stereotypical cooked "human" food, rather than a human eating "dog" food.
The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
None of these are the goal.
The goal is to deliver value. The saying just means to sample your own product, with the implication being that you should be doing some form of quality management. It could just as easily be “play with your own widgets”.
Bougie-fying it to champagne destroys much of the meaning because it literally doesn’t matter what the product is, you should be sampling it no matter how distasteful or irrelevant to your personal interests. You would not have a hard time getting people to sample champagne for their job.
For a PM to assume that the product ever becomes champagne feels very naive.
Didn't you just destroy your own argument? If dog food is expected to be more delicious to dogs than humans, how is eating it supposed to indicate anything about whether it's well-made for the dog? Shouldn't you have your dog eat it, rather than yourself?
So isn't your manager's alternative the one that actually makes sense?
George Carlin's famous piece on it:
This is a great substitution, and more accurate since humans and dogs have different preferences in food, so humans eating real dogfood is often avoided in practice.
But it's harder to to turn "drink your own champagne" into a gerund like "dogfooding".