Cereal History

Cereal first emerged in the late 1890s from the kitchen of the Michigan-based Battle Creek Sanitarium, an early health spa started by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, one of America's first wellness gurus. The cereal story involves fraternal strife and even features an appearance by future Kellogg competitor C.W. Post, an early patient at the spa who paid his way, in part, by working in the kitchen.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, Americans woke up to a new kind of breakfast: cold cereal. Poured from a box into a bowl and doused with milk, early cereals like Toasted Corn Flakes, Grape-Nuts and Shredded Wheat were not only lighter and easier to digest than more traditional breakfast staples like steak and eggs, hash, sausage, bacon and flapjacks. They also offered a previously unimaginable level of convenience to men, women and children whose schedules were adjusting to the quicker pace of an industrialized, rapidly urbanizing nation.