Baby formula has been around in commercial form since 1865, when German chemist Justus von Liebig patented the first manufactured infant food. But the practice of feeding babies something other than breast milk is far older, stretching back thousands of years. The product sitting on store shelves today is the result of roughly 160 years of industrial development, and centuries more of trial and error before that.
Before Formula: Animal Milk and Grain Mixtures
Long before anyone manufactured a powder in a factory, parents who couldn’t breastfeed turned to whatever was available. Animal milk from goats, cows, and donkeys was a common substitute across cultures. So was “pap,” a thin gruel made from bread or flour cooked in water or milk. These mixtures were nutritionally poor and often contaminated, contributing to high infant mortality rates. But for families without access to a wet nurse, they were the only option.
The First Manufactured Infant Foods
The modern history of formula begins in 1865, when Justus von Liebig, one of the most prominent chemists of the 19th century, developed what he called a “soluble food for babies.” His formula combined baked wheat flour, ground malt, and a small amount of potassium bicarbonate. The key innovation was the malt: it contained an enzyme that broke down the starch into sugars, making the mixture easier for an infant’s immature digestive system to handle. Liebig also chose grains rich in protein for muscle development and minerals for bone growth. It was crude by today’s standards, but it represented the first serious attempt to engineer an infant food based on chemistry rather than folk tradition.
Two years later, in 1867, German-born pharmacist Henri Nestlé launched his own product in Vevey, Switzerland. Called “farine lactée” (flour with milk), it combined cow’s milk, wheat flour, and sugar. Nestlé designed it specifically for infants who couldn’t be breastfed, motivated by the high child mortality rates of the era. The product sold well, and by 1878 Nestlé’s company was locked in fierce competition with Anglo-Swiss, with both firms expanding production internationally. The commercial infant food industry was born.
The Evaporated Milk Era
Despite these early commercial products, most families in the early 20th century didn’t use them. Instead, the dominant approach from roughly the 1930s through the 1960s was homemade formula built around evaporated milk. John B. Myerling had developed unsweetened evaporated milk in 1885, and pediatricians widely recommended it by the 1930s and 1940s. Parents would mix evaporated milk with water and a sweetener like corn syrup or sugar, sometimes adding vitamin and iron supplements on a doctor’s advice.
The appeal was straightforward: evaporated milk was cheap, available at any grocery store, and shelf-stable. Studies published in the 1920s and 1930s showed that babies fed evaporated milk formula grew about as well as breastfed infants, which reassured both doctors and parents. By 1960, an estimated 80% of bottle-fed infants in the United States were drinking an evaporated milk formula rather than a commercial product.
Commercial Formula Takes Over
Proprietary formulas had actually been introduced in the 1920s, but they were slow to catch on. Most parents preferred the cheaper, familiar evaporated milk approach. It wasn’t until the 1950s that commercial formulas began gaining real traction, helped along by marketing, pediatrician endorsements, and improved formulations. During the 1960s, their popularity grew steadily, and by the mid-1970s, commercial formulas had almost entirely replaced homemade evaporated milk mixtures as the standard for bottle-fed babies.
This shift happened partly because manufacturers kept improving their products. In 1934, Nestlé introduced Pelargon, a full-milk powder enriched with beneficial bacteria to improve digestibility. Brands like Similac and Enfamil emerged and refined their recipes over the decades. Physicians, who had previously spent considerable effort calculating custom formulas for individual infants using a complex system known as the “percentage method,” welcomed the simplicity of recommending a standardized commercial product.
Regulation and Safety Standards
For most of its commercial history, infant formula operated in a regulatory gray area. That changed in 1980, when the U.S. Congress passed the Infant Formula Act. The law created a distinct legal category for infant formula, separate from ordinary food, and required manufacturers to meet specific safety and nutritional standards. The Act included a table of required nutrients with minimum (and in some cases maximum) levels, reflecting recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Beyond just listing ingredients, the law mandated quality control procedures designed to ensure that nutrients remained potent through a product’s entire shelf life. Manufacturers had to build safety into the production process itself, with periodic testing requirements that went beyond the general “good manufacturing practices” applied to regular foods. The law also gave federal regulators the flexibility to update nutrient requirements as scientific understanding evolved, which proved important in the decades that followed.
Nutritional Advances Over Time
One of the most significant nutritional milestones came in 1969, when the American Academy of Pediatrics began strongly advocating for iron fortification of infant formulas. The goal was to reduce iron-deficiency anemia during the first year of life, a condition that can affect brain development and growth. Iron-fortified formulas became the standard recommendation and remain so today.
More recently, in 2002, U.S. formulas began including DHA and ARA, two fatty acids naturally present in breast milk. DHA is an omega-3 fat and ARA is an omega-6 fat, both important for brain and eye development in early life. Formulas in the United States typically include them in a roughly 2:1 ratio of ARA to DHA, though exact amounts vary by brand. Their addition marked a broader trend in formula development: trying to close the compositional gap between formula and breast milk, one nutrient at a time.
From Chemistry Experiment to Regulated Staple
The arc of baby formula spans roughly 160 years of commercial production and millennia of improvisation before that. What started as a chemist’s mixture of malt and wheat flour in 1865 has become a tightly regulated, nutritionally complex product. Each era brought its own dominant approach: animal milk and pap for centuries, then Liebig’s and Nestlé’s pioneering products, then the long reign of evaporated milk, and finally the commercial formulas that took over in the 1970s. Today’s formulas contain dozens of added vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids that those early products lacked entirely.