Never flake on breakfast!
From the sanitarium to the supermarket, let talk about the history of breakfast, and how it played into marketing!
SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Np2otFsqJE171_e_MXsh2fxIDybcRx1O39LcoBo6C7s/edit?usp=sharing
This month, I am plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank. To get more information, or to find out how to donate your time/money/food, visit their website: https://stlfoodbank.org/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
What did you have for breakfast today? If you’re like me, probably nothing, because I don’t usually feel like eating until it’s nearly lunchtime. But 85% of Americans do eat breakfast, and according to a report from the USDA, for about one in five adults consumes more than 30% of their daily energy intake from breakfast.
And for a good chunk of people – 51% of breakfast eaters, in fact – that breakfast involves grains of some sort. Biscuits, muffins, quick breads, pancakes, waffles, French Toast, cooked cereals, ready-to-eat cereals, bread, rolls, tortillas – it’s all part of a not-so balanced breakfast most commonly paired with proteins coming from eggs, omelets, bacons and sausages and sweet treats like doughnuts, sweet rolls, pastries and snack or meal bars.
And lots, and lots of coffee. Over half of all breakfast consumers have at least a serving of it, with the next closest beverage being water, which is consumers by just a third of adults.
Now, I don’t know about your house, but in mine, the staples of a kid’s breakfast usually involve three things.
Toast.
Bananas.
Breakfast cereal.
And, if it’s a weekend, maybe some pop-tarts or doughnuts. Because those things are loaded with sugar!
But let’s talk about breakfast cereal for a moment – a staple enjoyed by around 14% of consumers and 20% of breakfast eaters, powerful enough to spawn a marketing subculture filled with toy surprises and friendly mascots and pop culture tie-ins and even the odd endorsement by a group like the American Heart Association.
The thing is, ready to eat breakfast cereal is a rather recent innovation in human history, and its origins go back to a pretty unlikely place: a mental health asylum in Battle Creek, Michigan run by a man named Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.
His biggest competitor was a patient by the name of C.W. Post.
And the two of them were about to change breakfast forever!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
I want to warn listeners in advance that today’s show is going to get a little weird, because we’re going to be talking about flakes and nuts quite a bit here. And I don’t just mean literally – Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post are absolutely wild characters with some beliefs that sound pretty outlandish today.
Our story begins with post-Civil War America with the founding of what would become the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. And in case you’re wondering, no, the town of Battle Creek does not take its name from a battle in the Civil War nor any of the major American wars before it. It probably has more to do with conflicts with the local Potawatomi tribes in the 1820s, but that’s another story for another time.
Today, the town’s primarily known for three things: number one, as being the first major stop of the Underground Railroad and the subsequent home of Sojourner Truth, number two, for being instrumental in the foundation of the Seventh-day Adventist church, of which Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was a member, and number three, for being the longtime home of the Kellogg’s Company, which still resides there today under the name WK Kellogg Co alongside its sister company Kellanova.
Both of those companies, by the way, still use the brand logo and name Kellogg’s. But we’ll get to that in a few minutes.
Let’s instead go back to the 1870s, where Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, fresh out of medical school, was trying to tackle one of the biggest problems of his young career: gut health, which Dr. Kellogg believed was instrumental to helping people stave off disease and regulate their behavior.
Dr. Kellogg was a proponent of the vegetarian diet, believing that consuming meat led to gastric distress. He was quite a character, parading around in all-white suits so he could allow more sunlight to penetrate and often carrying white cockatoo on his shoulder. He was known for sponsoring contests where his vegetarian patients would challenge meat-eating football players to feats of endurance to prove the value of a vegetarian lifestyle. He also invented several machines designed to stimulate the gut by kneading, shocking, vibrating, shaking or even roasting his patients.
He was also a big fan of enemas. In fact, one of his most infamous treatment plans involved patients receiving a water enema and then being given a pint of yogurt – half of which they’d each and the other half of which would be administered in the other end.
You may also hear that Dr. Kellogg was particularly concerned with keeping people from pleasuring themselves sexually, and yes, that is absolutely true – it was not only a key agenda of his Seventh Day Adventist community, which held that self-stimulation led to insanity and other ailments, and also a driving force behind his belief in bland diets as a treatment for reducing that desire.
Dr. Kellogg and his wife Ella Eaton Kellogg were both inventors when it came to getting things going in the kitchen, however, and they experimented quite a bit with nuts and grains to try to find foods that would be bland but easy to chew and digest. One of their inventions was peanut butter, and while the Kelloggs were not the only people to invent this product and were happy to allow others to create their own, Dr. Kellogg did own two of the earliest patents on nut butters.
Another food Dr. Kellogg is credited with inventing is granola, which he originally called Granula but had to change due to a competing product already being on the market with that name – the first manufactured breakfast cereal, created by James Caleb Jackson in 1863 as a treatment for visitors to his water therapy spa in New York. In all fairness, Dr. Kellogg was probably ripping it off to some degree, so Jackson was well within his rights to make Kellogg change the name. Even so, you’d be hard-pressed to find Granula today. Granola, on the other hand, is an extremely common food, though it’s made a bit differently now than it was in Battle Creek.
But Dr. Kellogg is most famous for inventing a method for tempering dough made out of wheat, corn or rice to create flakes that could be baked and then served cold and ready to eat. The corn flakes were the most popular, and so Dr. Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg formed a company in 1897 called the Santias Food Company to produce whole grain cereals.
Eventually, the two brothers had a falling out about whether or not sugar should be added to their cereal, and Will founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in 1906, which would go on to become the Kellogg Company as it branched out into other products. And this led to even more distance between them, because Dr. Kellogg was no longer permitted to use his last name to market his own cereals. And Will had hard feelings as well since his brother had patented the tempering process on his own without giving credit to him.
Poor Ella got left entirely out of the discussion, but she probably played a role too, because she always insisted she was part of the discovery. We’ll give her credit here, because all too often when a woman says she was involved in anything a group of men take credit for, history tends to vindicate her.
So, now we know the origin story of Kellogg’s and its Toasted Corn Flakes, which would later just be known as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Kellogg’s treated its workers well and kept its factory running on four six-hour shifts, which helped the community by offering greater opportunities for employment. Kellogg’s was also an early adopter of mass market product advertising, following the lead of rival C.W. Post to use advertising to sell millions of boxes of cereal.
The company has long been noted for its forward-thinking approaches, like putting nutrition labels on its products before anyone else or adding vitamins to its cereal flakes to fortify them. When Kellogg’s introduced Special K and Frosted Flakes in the 1950s for postwar American to enjoy, they helped create a market for sweeter breakfast cereals as an alternative to people just adding sugar directly from the sugar bowl to their cereal.
And after introducing Pop-Tarts in 1964 and Apple Jacks in 1965, Kellogg’s started diversifying into a broader food company, eventually acquiring brands like Mrs. Smith’s Pie Company, Pure Packed Foods, Morningstar Farms, Kashi and Keebler Foods.
But before we talk about Kellogg’s in the present day, let’s go back to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where a patient named C.W. Post was intrigued by Dr. Kellogg’s process for tempering wheat and corn dough, and Dr. Kellogg was apparently happy to show any of his sanitarium guests how he did it, perhaps believing he was protected by his patent.
C.W. Post is an interesting and complicated fellow, a man who was both a tremendous entrepreneur – at one point even embarking on a career as a suspender salesman! – but also someone who struggled with overwork and stress to the point of having multiple nervous breakdowns and digestive issues. During these times, he relied heavily on his wife, Ella Letita Merriweather – yes, he also had a wife named Ella! – but he later divorced her so he could marry a secretary half his age and left her, according to her daughter Marjorie, to die of a broken heart.
Oh, and he also was accused of outright stealing ideas from Dr. Kellogg and his wife. His coffee substitute Post Postum, was quite similar to Dr. Kellogg’s Carmel Cereal Coffee.
His Elijah’s Manna breakfast cereal, later renamed Post Toasties, was basically just Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes.
And his most famous breakfast cereal, the oddly named granola-style breakfast cereal known as Grape-Nuts, was his take on Dr. Kellogg’s Malted Nuts.
And why Grape-Nuts, you might ask? There are different stories about where the name came from. The simpler one is that Post’s product resembled grape seeds but tasted like nuts. The more complex one is that Post believed that when the product was baked, it produced what he called “grape sugar” to accompany the nutty flavor.
Post set up his company, Postum Cereals, in Battle Creek in 1895. He was definitely just as savvy a businessman as Will Kellogg, and he became well-known for not only overpaying workers and ensuring that conditions in his factory were top-notch, but also for spending a large amount of money on advertising.
And this leads us to an interesting lynchpin in the history of product marketing. So there were at one point over 100 breakfast cereals in production in the Battle Creek area by the 1910s, and one of them, a brand called Force, created a mascot called Sunny Jim, a cartoon illustration of a fast-walking gentleman with a cane, a top hat and a trailing white pony tail with a bow on it.
C.W. Post decided he needed a mascot too, and so he hired a cartoonist to draw cartoon animals for his box designs. That person? Walt Disney, who’d create cutout drawings of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on Post Toasties boxes. The relationship between Disney and Post continues to this day.
Cereal advertisers gradually realized that children were their primary fans and started marketing more and more heavily to them with familiar characters including the Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, Buck Rogers or original mascots like Skippy, who repped for General Mills’s Wheaties. Kellogg’s even famously featured a Boy Scout eating Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in one of its posters. And of course Kellogg’s created an enduring mascot with the help of Leo Burnett when they launched Tony the Tiger in the 1950s to pitch their new Frosted Flakes.
But the more these cereals were marketed to children, the more sugar they started to contain. The cereal industry had a ready answer for any critics – more sugar meant more energy to help start your day! And thus breakfast cereals began to move further and further away from their health food origins.
C.W. Post never lived to see it. He died in 1914, and his daughter Marjorie Merriweather Post took over the company and her husband, Edward F. Hutton, eventually became one of its key leaders. They and a group of talented managers helped transform the company from a cereal producer to a publicly-traded food company that would eventually acquired Clarence Birdseye’s General Foods Company in 1929 and become a major player in the frozen foods market, helping to install freezer cabinets in grocery stores to carry their products. The product category was a huge hit, and between ready to eat cereals and ready to heat up frozen foods, C.W. Post’s company helped transform the American diet.
Today, the Post Holding Company is located just down the street from my own office here in St. Louis, and Kellogg’s is still headquartered in Battle Creek but has split into two companies, one of which is owned by Ferrero and the other of which is owned by Mars Inc.
And as for Dr. John and his brother Will Kellogg? They passed away within about 8 years of each other and are now buried side by side, with a sundial Will installed sitting peacefully over their family gravesite.
For a guys who turned out to be a bunch of nuts and flakes, everything seems to have worked out in the end.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
PLUG
This month I’m plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which is a not-for-profit organization that gathers and distributes food to over 500 food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and community program partners in the Greater St. Louis Area. This is a time of year when people are fighting not just the cold, but also the hunger that comes with higher heating bills, and supporting a food bank is a great way to have a powerful impact on your local community.
Over 40 million people in America struggle with food security and rely on government programs and charitable services to put food on their tables. Food banks are also facing more hardship than ever before due to operational strains from late 2025 due to the government shutdown and increased demand for assistance. They need us to step up and be donors and volunteers, and I encourage you to, at the very least, donate a few bucks today to help out.
While I always recommend supporting local food banks if you can, the St. Louis Area Foodbank is also a great choice because they provide so much support to so many organizations and are extremely transparent about how they utilize their funds. They have a perfect score on CharityNavigator and are an accredited charity with the Better Business Bureau and a partner with the United Way and Feeding America.
You can learn more at http://stlfoodbank.org/
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