Who invented baby food?

The jar of strained sweet potato in your cupboard is a surprisingly recent invention. For almost all of human history there was no such thing as a baby aisle. Babies drank milk, and then they ate softened versions of whatever everyone else was eating. How they got from the breast to the family pot is a stranger and more interesting story than "someone put peas in a jar," though someone did eventually do that too.

First, milk, from whoever had it

For most of history a baby’s first food was breast milk, and if the mother could not nurse, the job often went to a wet nurse, another lactating woman paid or expected to feed the child. Wet nursing is ancient. There are surviving contracts for it from thousands of years ago, and for wealthy families in many eras it was simply how infants were fed. The alternative, feeding a baby by hand with animal milk or gruel, was known as dry nursing and carried a much higher risk of the baby dying, mostly from contaminated food and vessels. Clean water and refrigeration are modern luxuries, and without them hand-feeding a newborn was genuinely dangerous.

Pre-chewed food, on purpose

Once a baby was ready for something more than milk, someone had to make adult food soft enough to swallow. Long before blenders and mesh strainers, the tool for that was a set of grown-up teeth. Premastication, an adult chewing food and passing it to the baby, appears across cultures and deep into prehistory. It sounds odd to modern parents, but it solved a real problem, and it likely passed along some helpful gut bacteria along with the meal. It faded as safer, easier ways to soften food arrived, and because chewing can also pass on germs like the ones that cause cavities.

Pap, panada, and the age of gruel

In Europe, the classic weaning foods for centuries were pap and panada. Pap was bread or flour cooked into a soft paste with water or milk. Panada was similar, often bread simmered in broth. They were cheap, soft, and endlessly available, and they were fed with special little vessels like pap boats and, later, early feeding bottles. They were also thin on nutrition and easy to contaminate, so while generations of babies grew up on gruel, it was never the triumph of infant nutrition that convenience made it seem.

The bottles were older than you think

Feeding babies from vessels is not a modern shortcut either. Archaeologists have found small spouted clay pots buried with infants in Bronze and Iron Age graves. When researchers analyzed the residue inside some of these roughly three thousand year old vessels, they found traces of animal milk. In other words, parents were bottle-feeding babies ruminant milk from a cup with a spout thousands of years before the first rubber nipple. The design was cute, sometimes shaped like little animals, and almost certainly hard to keep clean.

The chemists arrive: formula in the 1800s

The nineteenth century brought science, glass bottles, and the first commercial attempts to bottle infant nutrition itself. In the 1860s the German chemist Justus von Liebig developed and sold one of the first infant formulas, a mix of cow’s milk, wheat and malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate. In 1867 Henri Nestlé introduced his own milk-and-wheat food, Farine Lactée. These products were aimed at babies who could not be breastfed, and they marked the start of infant feeding as a manufactured product rather than a strictly household task.

The jar that changed the kitchen: Gerber, 1928

Solid baby food went commercial a bit later, and the tipping point is a good story. As it is told, Dorothy Gerber was straining peas by hand for her baby in Fremont, Michigan, and suggested her husband’s cannery could do the tedious job instead. In 1928 the Gerber company began selling strained baby food nationally, complete with the famous sketched baby face on the label. Suddenly a parent could buy a week of soft, safe, consistent baby meals off a shelf. It was a genuine convenience, and it also quietly reshaped what a first food was expected to look like for the next several generations.

Fortified cereal and the fight against deficiency

Around the same time, doctors were tackling a different problem: nutrient deficiencies like rickets. In the early 1930s, physicians at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto created Pablum, a precooked cereal fortified with iron and vitamins and easy to prepare. It was a real public-health advance, and iron-fortified infant cereal went on to become the default American first food for decades, for better and, as it later turned out, sometimes for worse. That part of the story, including why rice cereal eventually lost its crown, is its own tale.

Full circle, back to soft real food

Here is the twist. After a century of jars, boxes, and strained everything, a lot of modern advice has circled back toward something the pre-chewing ancestors would recognize: skip the special products when you can, and offer babies soft, safe versions of ordinary family food. Baby-led weaning, purées made from whatever you cooked for dinner, and a wide variety of flavors early are all, in a sense, a high-tech return to how babies ate for most of history, just with better hygiene and a blender.

Related reading

For how the medical advice itself changed, see a short history of first-foods advice. For what babies eat first around the globe today, see first foods around the world, and to start your own baby, see signs baby is ready for solids.

Frequently asked questions

How we write these: from widely published pediatric guidance (AAP, NIAID 2017 guidelines, the LEAP study), with sources cited on every page. Pending review by a pediatric professional.

This is general information, not medical advice, and has not been individually reviewed for your baby. Always talk to your pediatrician about your baby's diet, introducing allergens, and any reaction. In an emergency, contact emergency services.

Some links in our guides are affiliate links: if you buy through them we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. We only suggest things we'd actually use, and it never changes our guidance.