Lafeber Company
Pelleted and foraging diets for companion birds and small animals, mixed and packaged at a plant standing on the founding family’s own Illinois farmland.
🇺🇸 Made in USA
Our assessment
Company details
Where Lafeber Company products are made
Lafeber’s manufacturing statement is unusually concrete for a pet-food company: “Our manufacturing facility has always been located on the Lafeber family farmland, and all of our products are mixed, formed, and packaged under one roof.” No co-packer is named anywhere on the site, and no second plant.
Company-level origin claims are common; per-product ones are not. “Made in USA” appears in the bullet list on Lafeber’s parrot food, its parrot treats, its guinea pig vitamin supplement and its guinea pig forage — two different animal categories, four different products. A standing badge on those pages reads “Mixed and packaged on our family farmland.”
The claim covers manufacturing, not agriculture. Ingredient decks include dried fruit, canary grass seed, safflower and carrageenan with no origin given. One product is specific — Berrie-Bale names “Western timothy hay grown on a family farm in the Northwest USA” — but that is a single-product statement, not a sitewide one.
The Federal Trade Commission treats “Made in USA” as a claim about where a product is manufactured, and expects that processing to be domestic. Lafeber’s claim is a manufacturing claim, made at product level and located at a named plant. It is not a claim about where every ingredient is grown, and this profile does not present it as one.
The story
Dr. T.J. Lafeber qualified as a veterinarian at Iowa State in 1949 and built what the company describes as the largest pet-bird hospital in the United States, in suburban Chicago. The clinical problem that started the business was blunt: most of the birds he treated “were dying of malnutrition,” fed seed-only diets that let them pick out the fatty seeds and leave the rest.
His answer was the first commercial pelleted diet for companion birds, made at first on a small mill in the back room of the Niles Animal Hospital. He founded Lafeber Company in 1973 and, in the late 1970s, bought five acres of his father’s Illinois farmland. The plant has been on that ground ever since.
The second generation is also a veterinarian. Dr. Ted Lafeber III learned to run the pellet machine at the back of the animal hospital at thirteen, qualified at Iowa State in 1988, and became president in 1990. In 1989 father and son developed Nutri-Berries — pellets bound into a foraging shape, so birds work for the food instead of sorting it — which launched in the fall of 1990 and is still the company’s flagship.
Why they matter
Pet food is a category where domestic manufacturing claims are easy to make loosely and hard to check. Most brands are owned by large groups, made by contract manufacturers the buyer never sees, and described in language that stops just short of naming a place.
Lafeber names the place. The claim is at product level, the plant sits on land the family bought from a relative, and there is no parent company to route the question to. The company also has no obvious commercial reason to be in Cornell, Illinois other than that it is where the Lafebers are.
The veterinary thread matters too. The company runs LafeberVet, a free veterinary education library, created the EmerAid critical-care diets for birds, raptors and reptiles, and sponsors the avian practitioner award presented at the Association of Avian Veterinarians’ annual meeting — work that sits behind the product rather than in front of it.
Shop Lafeber Company products
Nutri-Berries, Avi-Cakes, Pellet-Berries, Premium Daily Pellets and the Berrie-Bale and Nutri-Hay small-animal range — mixed, formed and packaged at the Cornell, Illinois plant.
Shop all Lafeber Company products →Visit Lafeber Company website →
Lafeber Company questions
Is Lafeber bird food made in the USA?
Yes. “Made in USA” appears on Lafeber product pages across both bird food and small-animal food, and the company states that “all of our products are mixed, formed, and packaged under one roof” at its plant on the Lafeber family farmland in Illinois.
Where is Lafeber based?
24981 N 1400 East Road, Cornell, Illinois 61319. The plant and the company address are the same place.
Are Lafeber’s ingredients American too?
Lafeber does not make that claim sitewide, and this profile does not make it for them. The origin claim covers manufacturing. One product — Berrie-Bale — names “Western timothy hay grown on a family farm in the Northwest USA”; the rest of the ingredient decks give no origin.
Who owns Lafeber?
The Lafeber family. The company describes itself as family- and veterinarian-owned and names no parent company. It was founded in 1973 by Dr. T.J. Lafeber; his son Dr. Ted Lafeber III became president in 1990.