The Kelloggs Read online

  Ironically, when John first recruited him into his cereal-creating schemes, Will looked upon the assignment as one more time-consuming task capriciously assigned by the doctor. Yet with each successive experiment, Will performed the work with more enthusiasm, ingenuity, and precision. It was the first indication—there would be many more during his long career as a food industrialist—that inside Will’s increasingly paunchy body existed a man of science always eager to get his hands dirty in order to figure out a particular gastronomic problem.

  This brings us to Will’s account of reusing the “day-old dough,” which remains intriguing, if impossible to prove. In his telling, one Friday night, dog-tired from the fourteen-hours-a-day, six-day workweek that had just ended, the brothers decided to stop and get some much needed sleep. Always careful about the expenditure of every penny, Will put the dough he had just made in a container rather than simply throwing it in the trash. The next day, the Saturday Adventist Sabbath, was a day of rest and the brothers did not return to their experiment until the Sabbath officially ended at nightfall. Upon the close of the concluding service in the San’s chapel, Will and John put down their hymnals and raced back to the kitchen where they began kneading and rolling out Friday’s dough. During this rolling, however, each detected the distinct odor of mold emanating from the sticky wheat. John and Will shrugged their shoulders, ignored the fact that their dough had turned slightly moldy, fed thin sheets of the stuff through the rollers, scraped off the bits with a big knife, and baked them. A short while later, they contended with a grease fire while the flakes were in the oven that was, fortunately, contained without damage to the batch or the kitchen. A mere fire could not and would not impede the greatest moment of the Kellogg brothers’ lives. Consistent with John’s account was the discovery, after running the cooked dough through the rollers, “it came out in the form of large, thin flakes, each individual wheat berry forming one flake!”53

  Regardless of the exact order of events leading up to leaving out the dough for an extended period of time, it was the mold that really made the flakes so good and crunchy. After consulting with several of the bakers at the Sanitarium, the Kellogg brothers learned that by leaving the dough out for so many hours, they were facilitating a process called tempering. Basically, as the mold ferments, the water content of the dough equalizes across the entire mass rather than collecting in specific spots. At the same time, the dough temperature approximates the ambient room temperature. Finally, Will and John learned that thinly rolled, tempered dough baked more evenly and with fewer air bubbles, all of which helped produce perfect flakes.

  Will performed countless more experiments to find “the sweet spot” between tempering the dough enough to facilitate equalizing the temperature and water content but not too long so that the dough became too moldy and inedible.54 With the care and attention of a well-trained scientist, Will kept a detailed record of every batch he produced and every single result in a laboratory notebook. Air-drying, for example, subjected the dough to too much humidity and resulted in flakes that were not sufficiently crunchy or light. Atmospheric conditions, the length of baking time, and, of course, the baking temperature (always within a range of 400 to 480 degrees Fahrenheit), Will discovered, also mattered a great deal.

  A major problem that Will had to solve was preventing the boiled dough from sticking to the rollers. The initial rolling apparatus they used was operated by a hand crank device and set up on a tabletop. Dominant John fed the dough into a hopper while standing from above. Subservient Will, crouched directly and uncomfortably underneath the table, essentially catching the flattened dough ejected by the rolls. With a chisel in one hand and a bowl in the other, he scraped off the sticky bits of the wheat dough for toasting. Understandably, Will quickly tired of this painful arrangement and one night he ran over to the Review and Herald Company’s production plant. Entering through an unlocked side door into the “finishing room,” he borrowed several long knives that the printers used as paper cutters to make individual pages as they came off the press for binding. Once back in the kitchen, Will took out a few screws and nails to firmly affix the long knives to the lower roller. After the blades were nailed in, he weighted them down so that they were as close as possible to the roller. This allowed him to better scrape off the wet dough, while still standing rather than crouching, and produce the optimal tiny thin bits of wheat dough for baking into delicate flakes. Ever the systems expert, Will figured out that the best flakes emerged when they fed carefully measured rolls of dough, 8 inches in diameter and 24 inches in length, through the rollers.55

  On May 31, 1895, John applied to the U.S. Patent Office for a patent on “Flaked Cereal and Process of Preparing the Same” (No. 558,393).56 It was granted on April 14, 1896. Clever in protecting his rights, John made sure that the patent covered flakes made of oats, corn, barley, and other grains, as well as wheat flakes. Will should have received a co-credit on the patent application but none was forthcoming from his elder brother. For the rest of his life, Will reasonably insisted that the invention was hardly his brother’s alone.57 In the passive-aggressive manner Will perfected over the years, he always noted that when you looked at Will Kellogg, you were looking at the real creator of flaked cereal: “For some reason,” Will quietly added, “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 suggestion that the flakes be allowed to remain whole and be served in that way.”58

  In the summer of 1895, the brothers introduced their wheat flakes as a meal for the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventists at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. From the buzz in the San’s dining room, it was clear that the brothers had hit upon something important. Everyone lined up for bowl after bowl of the flakes and found them especially appealing when splashed with some milk, cream, or yogurt. An added bonus was the regularity of the guests’ bowel movements and resolution of their bellyaches following these flaky meals. Dr. Kellogg named the new wheat cereal “Granose,” a neologism of grain and the scientific suffix “ose,” for metabolism. The brothers sold their cereal at the San and by mail order. A 10-ounce package cost 15 cents. Yet even with this small circle of potential customers, they found that they could not keep up with the demand from the Adventist faithful. It was at this point that Will took on the task of expanding their production methods beyond the tiny setup they had used in Ella’s (or the San’s experimental) kitchen.

  Later that year, Will hired some bakers and workmen to staff a tiny makeshift “factory,” which also served as the home of the Sanitarium Food and the Sanitas Nut Food companies. In their first year of production, they sold or served over 113,400 pounds of Granose. By 1898, the business had outgrown the first factory and Will rented a two-story ramshackle building with a basement on Aldrich Street. This structure boasted real ovens and, according to Will, “the business continued to grow under rather mediocre management.”59 Here, the reader must be warned about Will’s tendency for modesty; even at this early date his cereal factory was operating twenty-four hours a day while Will was working 118 to 120 hours a week, tending to his responsibilities at the Sanitarium, the publishing house, and ancillary companies.60 During this same period, Puss and Will Kellogg lost two children. Their son Will Keith Jr. died in 1889 at the age of four and another boy, Irvin Hadley, died in 1895 before he was one year old.

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  AN OFT-TOLD TALE about the early Kellogg’s flaked cereals was that they were manufactured using heavy metal rollers designed to crush the stems off tobacco leaves. This story is only partially true and originates from the fact that the Lauhoff Brothers Company, a Detroit-based firm Will hired to design and manufacture his dough-rolling equipment, manufactured both tobacco rollers for their cigar-making business and the large rollers required for milling flour.61

  Sometime around 1900, Frank and William Lauhoff made a major contribution to the production of flaked cereal by developing a wa
ter-cooled roller, which they hoped to use for manufacturing their own brand of flaked cereal, Crystal Malt Flakes. The original rollers worked at a continuous pace and became quite hot, necessitating stopping them every so often to ice and cool them down, lest the thin dough burn and ruin the batch. Applying his experience with the rolling machines used to separate tobacco leaves from stems, Frank Lauhoff set the individual rollers to move at different speeds, which prevented the doughy, moist flakes from sticking to the rollers, wasting dough, and losing time for frequent cleanings. What’s more, when the dough was rolled on a cooled set of rollers going at different speeds, the resulting flakes retained their crispness longer.62

  As the news spread that the Kelloggs had figured out how to spin 60 cents’ worth of wheat into 12 dollars of gold, a phalanx of businessmen, and not a few charlatans, herded themselves to Battle Creek to start their own cereal companies. Unlike John, they had no professional strictures against advertising or how they sold or made their grainy wares. By 1902, Will had instituted a strict policy requiring all employees to sign a legal document promising not to reveal the company’s trade secrets to anyone or form competitive cereal firms. Such precautions did little to prevent several employees from breaching this contract, a deceit that, undoubtedly, contributed to the establishment of 101 new cereal companies in Battle Creek between 1888 and 1905.63 Several of these firms produced some fairly popular cereal products (C. W. Post’s being the most sterling example of this success); many others were poorly run and destined for bankruptcy; and some were nothing but clever schemes designed to swindle money from unsuspecting investors.

  Failures and bunkum aside, the cereal “gold rush” in Battle Creek made for national news. For example, a front-page article in the September 7, 1902, issue of the New York World reported:

  There is not a pauper in Battle Creek, not a hovel home in the town….As for the factories, most of them are running by night and on Sundays in order to keep pace with the demand for their goods….Battle Creek is the greatest cereal food producing city in the world.64

  John T. McCutcheon, the popular Chicago Tribune and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, presented an even more graphic depiction of the cereal boom. Parodying the flourishing prices and values of cereal stocks and the companies they represented, he portrayed the “Battle Creek Sanitarium Food Co.: The Original and Genuine Battle Creek Food Institution” surrounded by shacks, advertisement signs, and lean-tos and populated by drummers, manufacturers, and con men, each one trying to make a buck off the production of cereal.

  The cereal “gold rush” in Battle Creek. A cartoon by John T. McCutcheon that appeared in the Chicago Tribune, circa 1904 Credit 40

  Competing with the Kelloggs’ wheat flakes were all kinds of cereals with names such as Zest, Vim, Cero-Fruto, Flake-Ho, Per-Fo, and Malta-Vita. One early popular product that presaged the trend toward sugar-filled cereals was Mapl-Flakes, which, as the name implies, was impregnated with loads of maple syrup. Children loved them. A national advertising campaign promised enthusiastic boys and girls across the nation that Mapl-Flakes were the preferred cereal of the University of Michigan football team, coached by the legendary Fielding Yost, and were responsible for the Wolverines’ “power and drive” when the team “clobbered Minnesota 23 to 6 on Thanksgiving Day of 1902.” In one bold advertisement, the Wolverines’ star halfback, Willie Heston, declared he never began a day without a heaping bowl of Mapl-Flakes.65

  In the midst of the cereal gold rush he helped create, Will pressed the doctor to expand the business even more, develop a national advertising campaign, sell the cereal in grocery stores across the country, and make some real money. Each time Will asked for such permission, John responded with a resounding “No.” Everyone in Battle Creek, it seemed, was profiting on Will’s hard work and yet his own firm’s growth was hamstrung by the doctor’s strict orders against any commercialization or advertising that might jeopardize his standing in the medical community. Ironically, the one man who most agreed with Will’s vision was the same person who would become his chief rival, a nervous fellow named Charles W. Post who was actively building an enormous food empire of his own.

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  WHEN CHARLEY POST CAME TO Battle Creek, he was a thirty-six-year-old failed businessman in poor health. He had already suffered, at least, three neurasthenic breakdowns and had long complained of painful indigestion. Emaciated and wheelchair bound, Post first consulted Dr. Kellogg in February of 1891.66 In the months that followed, Dr. Kellogg analyzed his gastric juices, counted his blood cells, and attempted to alter Post’s disordered pattern of bowel movements. The Post coffers, however, were just about empty. Before arriving in Battle Creek, Post’s wool mill business in Fort Worth mysteriously burned to the ground and he paid some of his San bills with the blankets he was able to rescue from the blaze; other times he and his wife lived off the income from a new type of men’s pants suspenders she sold door-to-door. More frequently, Charley Post covered his mounting medical bills by helping out Will and his assistants in the experimental kitchen laboratory, a gig that gave him unfettered access to Dr. Kellogg’s most valuable recipes.

  C. W. Post, circa 1912 Credit 41

  Mr. and Mrs. Post never resided in the San because it was too expensive. Instead, they opted for the far cheaper route of rooming across the street in one of the many nearby boardinghouses while spending their mornings and afternoons taking water cures, dining on Sanitarium fare, getting massages, and engaging in calisthenics at reduced “day-patients” rates. In later years, Post complained that Dr. Kellogg’s regimes did little to improve his physical health. That may or may not be true, but Charley’s stay at the San certainly improved his economic health.

  In the spring of 1892, Post settled his account and left the Sanitarium to work with a local Christian Science practitioner. That May, he somehow acquired the funds to buy a ten-acre plot of land some ten miles outside Battle Creek where he opened a “medical boardinghouse” he called La Vita Inn, which offered spiritual and natural remedies.67 Soon after, he began to manufacture “health foods” under the brand name “C. W. Post.” Post paved the “Road to Wellville” (a utopian ad campaign Post created to hawk his many products) with two wildly popular foods. The first was Postum, a direct steal of Dr. Kellogg’s “Minute Brew,” a caramelized molasses and roasted bran “coffee substitute,” which Charley Post advertised as a health drink with the entirely misleading slogan, “It Makes Red Blood!”68 Two years later, on January 1, 1895, Post rolled out a cereal he called Grape-Nuts, which contained neither grapes nor nuts of any kind. Instead, they were the same baked wheat crumbs Dr. Kellogg packaged as Granola but sweetened with maltose—the principal sugar in grapes but also found in many other foods. The success of these two foods allowed Post to erect a “White City” of factory buildings in Battle Creek, a name he appropriated from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. By 1900, his firm was making a net profit of $3 million a year (or more than $87 million in 2016).

  Postum factory, Battle Creek, Michigan, circa 1900 Credit 42

  The Kellogg brothers’ opinion of Post acidified over the years. Initially, the doctor considered his recipes to be a gift for improving human health rather than a means of making a profit and he appeared not to give Post much attention. Will, on the other hand, constantly carped that the man was stealing their business. The animosity between the two men really bubbled over after 1906, when Post directly copied Will’s Corn Flake recipe to produce his own corn cereal, originally marketed under the quasi-religious banner of “Elijah’s Manna.” By 1908, millions of Americans were consuming C. W. Post’s corn flakes with the far more appealing brand name, “Post Toasties.” A few sales figures from the Post Company easily explain Will’s anger over Charley’s gastronomic thefts. Between September of 1908 and September of 1909, the C.W. Post Company reported that profits from Post Toasties amounted to $2,185,820.98, from Postum Cereal Coffee, $1.4 million, and from Grape-Nuts, $1.7 million (a total of more than $
142 million in 2016).69 Decades later, Albert Lasker, the successful advertising expert, philanthropist, and public health patron, recalled that Dr. Kellogg “felt that Post was a plagiarist.” A seething Will often referred to Post as the “Original Imitator.” A friend of Will’s recalled years later, “W.K. never had any love for Mr. Post. He always had the feeling of wanting to surpass the gentleman….They largely hissed at each other over the fence.”70

  The Road to Wellville, Postum Cereal Company advertisement, circa early 1920s Credit 43

  Grape=Nuts advertisement, circa early 1900s Credit 44

  C. W. Post never really got over his chronic stomach pain despite his long search for his own Wellville. In the years before the First World War, the Postum palatine encamped at his expansive estate in Santa Barbara, California. By the fall of 1913, he was running out of strength and steam. Scheduled to give a major speech in Philadelphia railing against the policies of Woodrow Wilson in general and, in particular, the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowing for an income tax, Charley canceled at the last minute.71 The gastric distress that had plagued him throughout his adulthood became uncontainable. In early March of 1914, Post was rushed from California to Rochester, Minnesota, writhing in pain, for an emergency appendectomy performed by the other fabled pair of Midwestern brothers interested in health matters, Charles and Will Mayo.