Dawe's Laboratories

"In the early 1920s, Charles C. Dawe, a young man known as “C. C.”, was the manager of a few Piggly Wiggly grocery stores in Denver, Colorado. Looking for better opportunities, C. C. heard about a business based on buttermilk, the liquid remaining after cream was churned into butter. Before the First World War, most buttermilk was simply poured into sewers. After the war, some buttermilk was fed in its liquid form to farm animals. In 1926, C. C. bought a milk-drying plant in Denver, and began to dry buttermilk on a large, heated roller. The drying process drove water off the buttermilk, resulting in a better preserved product that was relatively rich in Vitamin A and B-complex vitamins. Because it was concentrated, the dried product could be shipped more economically, and it blended more uniformly into corn and soybean meal, the major components of animal feed. Cod liver oil, a good source of Vitamin D, was another feed ingredient first used in the early 1920s. It too was poured directly into the feed mixer. Multiple sources of vitamins such as cod liver oil and buttermilk had not yet been combined successfully into a single, efficient multi-vitamin supplement."