Hill's Pet Nutrition, Inc., marketed simply as "Hills", is an American pet food company that produces dog and cat foods. The company is a subsidiary of Colgate-Palmolive.
History
Hill's Pet Nutrition was founded in the spring of 1907 by Burton Hill and started operation as Hill Rendering Works. Hill Rendering Works provided rendering services to Shawnee County, Kansas, and had a contract with Topeka, Kansas, to dispose of dead and lame animals. Hill Rendering works produced tallow, hides, tankage, meat scraps and farm animal feed including hogs and chicken feed. By the 1930s, the name had changed to Hill Packing Company which included a milling division, Hill Milling company. At this time the company was producing farm animal feed, dog food and horse meat for human consumption, processing 500 head of horse per week. The meat was being shipped to markets in Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands. Much of the horse meat was sold to the east coast as a product called Chopped and Cured and shipped to Europe as barreled horse loins. In 1948, Mark L. Morris contacted Hill Packing Company to produce Canine k/d. Hill Packing company became the license producer of Canine k/d. In 1968, the food line was made available through veterinarians and pet professionals as Hill's Science Diet. The line continued to expand and includes more than 60 Prescription Diet brand pet foods and Science Diet brand pet foods. In 1968, Hill Packing company was sold to Riviana Foods, then in 1976 the Colgate-Palmolive Company merged with Riviana Foods.
Product brands
Science Diet
was developed in the 1960s by Mark L. Morris, Jr.. Morris was the son of veterinarian Dr. Mark Morris Sr., who pioneered the field of veterinary clinical nutrition when asked to create a specialized diet for the original seeing-eye dog, Buddy, a female German Shepherd with kidney disease. That success led Morris and his son to create additional condition-specific and life-stage pet food formulas under the Prescription Diet and Science Diet brand names. Between 1932 and 1942, Dr. Francis Pottenger conducted a 10 year study in nutrition on 900 cats and discovered that cats suffered from health complications on a cooked meat diet and stopped reproducing themselves. In 1948, Morris Sr. ignored Pottenger's findings and produced cooked diets.
Prescription Diet
Prescription Diet is a line of pet food formulated to help cats and dogs with health issues.
Recalls
One Prescription Diet line and five products of the Science Diet line were involved in the 2007 pet food recalls for their inclusion of melamine tainted wheat gluten received from China. On January 31, 2019, Hill's recalled 25 varieties of its canned dog food, because of elevated levels of vitamin D, due to a supplier error. Vitamin D overdose in animals can cause irreversible kidney damage and eventually death. On February 12, 2019, San Francisco law firm Schubert Jonckheer & Kolbe LLP filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Hill's on behalf of affected owners for distributing dog food which contained potentially toxic levels of vitamin D.
