On this day in vegan history · February 19, 1906
Will Kellogg Breaks With His Brother and Sells the Flakes
The flaked cereal a Seventh-day Adventist doctor invented for vegetarian patients got a factory, a spoonful of sugar, and a brother who left the sanitarium to sell it to everyone.
The facts
- Date founded
- February 19, 1906, Battle Creek, Michigan
- Original patent
- "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same," issued April 14, 1896, to John Harvey Kellogg
- Renamed
- Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company (1909), then Kellogg Company (1922)
- Cause of the split
- John Harvey Kellogg opposed selling the cereal beyond sanitarium patients and adding sugar to it
John Harvey Kellogg ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, where he prescribed patients a strict vegetarian diet and had patented a flaked-cereal process in 1896. His younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, worked at the sanitarium as bookkeeper and business manager and wanted to sell the flakes far beyond the patient population, sweetened for a mass audience. John refused. On February 19, 1906, Will broke off and founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company on his own, adding sugar to the recipe the sanitarium had built around vegetarian health reform. The company he started that day became the Kellogg Company.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
a low-fat, low-protein vegetarian diet with an emphasis on whole grains, fiber-rich foods, and most importantly, nuts
describing the dietary regimen John Harvey Kellogg prescribed at the Battle Creek Sanitarium
Source: Wikipedia -
I will invest my money in people.
Will Keith Kellogg
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The split shows how quickly a vegetarian health-reform diet, built for patients at a religious sanitarium, could be stripped of its principles and turned into a sugared mass-market product the moment it left the building. The health reform stayed in Battle Creek; the breakfast went everywhere.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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