Born April 7, 1860, Will Keith Kellogg was responsible for radically changing the way Americans eat breakfast. With his older brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, he invented the first breakfast cereal, an early version of today’s Corn Flakes, which sold more than one million cases in its first three years and earned his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, the title of “cereal city.” In The Original Has This Signature: W.K. Kellogg
When the Kellogg brothers produced the first precooked flaked cereal in 1894, they had no idea they were inventing a breakfast food. The phrase itself was unknown. What was being sought was a more digestible substitute for bread.
A sanitarium patient brought to Dr. Kellogg one day a sample of a new health food, a shredded wheat, which had been sent to her by a friend in Denver. The food appeared to promote the flow of saliva in the mouth and gastric juices in the stomach and thus was more readily digestible than bread. So interested was the doctor in the product that he made a special trip to Denver to see the innovator, one Henry D. Perky, a lawyer. The two compared notes on food experiments and Perky promised to send one of his shredding machines to Battle Creek. However, this machine never arrived and its lack, plus an evolving conclusion that a shredded food was not the solution to his problems, caused the Doctor to announce: “We’ll invent a better food.”
This was an inventor who could call his shot. In an interview years later, he said that the idea of flaking wheat by compressing it came to him in a dream. Dream or not, his first efforts in the kitchen of his own home proved a failure. He did not succeed in producing individualized flakes and he turned to Will Kellogg for assistance in the experiments.
“He sent over a sample of boiled wheat,” Mr. Kellogg later related, “and wanted me to make something like it, but he did not know just the length of time to boil it. My instructions from him were to boil a quantity for fifteen minutes, another for twenty, twenty-five, and thirty, and up to one hour.
“These experiments I did in the kitchen of the sanitarium, on the range, at night, when I had finished my other work. After it was boiled, the Doctor took it to another part of the basement where there was a set of smooth roller which had been used to grind Granola.” These rolls, as Mr. Kellogg recalled them, were eight inches in diameter and about twenty-four inches long. Dr. Kellogg fed the wheat into the hopper at the top and it was Will Kellogg’s duty to squat down underneath the rolls and scrape the sticky and gummy dough off the rolls with a chisel. After one or two nights of this, Mr. Kellogg suggested that the scraping could be done better by a large knife, such as those used in book binderies and printing offices. He obtained a pair of worn-out knives and, with some aid, fastened them to the lower side of the rollers, weighting them so that they pressed firmly against the rolls and scraped off the dough. The experiments continued for some time without success. Then on a Thursday or Friday, a batch of wheat was cooked for some additional tests to be run that day. Other duties intervened, however, and nothing was done until Saturday night. Although by then, the cooked wheat had become decidedly moldy, the two brothers decided to run it through the rollers to see what would happen. Much to their surprise, it came out in the form of large, thin flakes, each individual wheat berry forming one flake!
There happened to be a fire in the kitchen range. The flakes were baked and come out crisp and tasty, if one overlooked the slight moldiness. It was some time before the Kellogg brothers unearthed the reason for their accidental success. They had inadvertently stumbled upon the principle of “tempering.” To equalize the moisture throughout the wheat, the Kelloggs after considerable experimenting learned to temper the cooked wheat by letting it stand for several hours in a tin-lined bin. This eliminated the moldiness.
“For some reason,” Mr. Kellogg later summarized, “the Doctor thought best to take the flakes after they had been nicely formed, put a sieve over a barrel and break the flakes up and rub them to pieces. It was my own suggestion that the flakes be allowed to remain whole and be served that way.” Mr. Kellogg prevailed and flaked foods were born.
Even though these early Granose flakes had little in common with the light, delicate flakes produced in the Kellogg plant today, for they were tough and rather tasteless since salt was the only flavoring, they were immediately popular with the sanitarium patients and showed a steady growth in sales until they were crowded out of the market by more aggressive imitators.
On May 31, 1894, Dr. Kellogg filed an application for a patent on “flaked cereals and process of preparing same.” At first the new food was supplied only to patients, but as the mail orders began to come in from former sanitarium visitors, Granose was put up in ten-ounce packages selling retail at fifteen cents a package.
During the closing years of the nineteenth century, Dr. Kellogg’s food business expanded almost in spite of itself. Because of medical ethics, the Doctor refused to allow his name to be associated with the foods. Ultraliberal in many of his attitudes, the Doctor was a conservative in business matters and was opposed to large-scale national advertising. These restrictions chafed at the innate and developing business talents of Will Kellogg:
“I recall having offered a suggestion that, in my opinion, if given the opportunity, the food company would develop in such a manner that the sanitarium would be only a side show as to the magnitude of the food business. I confess at the time I little realized the extent to which the food business might develop in Battle Creek.”
–Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu
*Photo courtesy minusbaby.
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