Meaning
The practice of a company using its own products internally, under the same conditions as its customers, both to catch faults early and to demonstrate confidence in the product. Chiefly software-industry usage; occurs as the verb 'to dogfood' and in the fuller expression 'eating your own dog food'. Neutral-to-wry jargon rather than slang. Insider jargon with a mildly comic image; sometimes deployed critically when a company visibly avoids its own products. Regional use: General English within the software and tech industries.
Origin
The image comes from 1970s pet-food advertising lore: Alpo's spokesman Lorne Greene said he fed Alpo to his own dogs, and Kal Kan's president was said to eat a can of his own product at shareholder meetings. Tech-industry usage is anchored at Microsoft, where engineer Jim Harris reportedly asked 'will the dogs eat the dog food?' and manager Paul Maritz sent a 1988 email titled 'Eating our own Dogfood' urging the group building LAN Manager to run it internally; the internal test server took the name 'dogfood'. Warren Harrison traced this history in IEEE Software in 2006. The word and the practice spread industry-wide in the 1990s and 2000s, alongside euphemisms such as 'drinking your own champagne'. Retellings of the Microsoft anecdote vary in small details, which is worth flagging.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- dogfood (verb)
- drinking your own champagne
- eat your own dog food
- eating your own dog food
Usage Examples
- The team had been dogfooding the new email client for months before the public beta opened.
- It is hard to trust a security vendor that does not eat its own dog food.
- Dogfooding caught the crash on day one, because the whole department was running the build.