Some dogs do not eat their dinner so much as inhale it. Bowl down, gone in twenty seconds, then they stand there looking at you like you forgot to feed them. It is easy to read as a good appetite and leave it alone, but a dog that eats that fast is swallowing a lot of air with the food, and in deep-chested breeds especially that is the setup for bloat, which is a genuine emergency that kills dogs within hours. Even in a small apartment mutt with no bloat risk, the gulping causes the other thing everyone knows, the ten-minutes-later vomit of a barely chewed pile of kibble back onto the rug.
The good news is this is one of the easier problems to actually fix, and the fix is mechanical rather than behavioral, so it works on day one instead of after weeks of training.
Why the speed is a real problem, not a quirk
When a dog eats fast it gulps air along with the food. That air expands the stomach, and in a large or deep-chested dog the distended stomach can twist on itself, cutting off blood flow. That is gastric dilatation-volvulus, and it is the reason vets tell Great Dane and Standard Poodle owners to take feeding speed seriously. Smaller dogs rarely twist, but they still get the reflux, the choking, and the regurgitation. Slowing the meal down solves all of it because the dog physically cannot swallow the same volume of air.
A slow feeder bowl is the ten-dollar fix
The simplest tool is a bowl with ridges and channels molded into the bottom so the food is spread out and the dog has to work the kibble out of the grooves instead of scooping a mouthful. A decent slow feeder dog bowl turns a twenty-second meal into a five-minute one, which is exactly what you want. Match the maze difficulty to the snout, a flat-faced dog like a pug needs shallow, wide ridges or it just gets frustrated and gives up. Wash it properly, the grooves trap grease and most people rinse them badly.
Puzzle feeders do double duty
If your dog is a fast eater and also bored during the day, which describes half the apartment dogs in the country, a puzzle feeder solves two problems with one object. Instead of a bowl, the dog nudges, paws, or rolls a toy that dispenses a few pieces of kibble at a time, so the meal becomes twenty minutes of mental work. A treat-dispensing puzzle feeder is especially good for the crate-and-work-from-home crowd, and we go deeper on this in the piece on the best puzzle toys to keep an apartment dog busy.
No-cost tricks if you do not want to buy anything
You can slow a dog down without spending a dollar. Spread the kibble across a large baking sheet so it is a single layer the dog has to hunt across. Put a clean, dog-safe object in the middle of a normal bowl, a tennis ball or an upturned smaller bowl, so they have to eat around it. Or feed by hand in scattered small portions if you have the patience. These all work, they are just less convenient than a bowl you can fill and walk away from.
Split the meals if the gulping is severe
A dog that is frantic at mealtime is often just too hungry because it is being fed one big meal a day. Splitting the same daily amount into two or three smaller meals takes the desperation out of it, and for any dog with real bloat risk, several small meals is the standard advice regardless of speed. If your dog has suddenly started bolting food when it never used to, or is acting hungry all the time, that is worth a mention to your vet rather than only a hardware fix, because a change in appetite can point at something medical.