W. K. Kellogg

• Born: April 7, 1860
• Birthplace: Battle Creek, Michigan
• Died: October 6, 1951
• Place of death: Battle Creek, Michigan

American food manufacturer

Kellogg and his brother, doctor John H. Kellogg, discovered cold, dry, flaked cereal while experimenting with healthy foods to serve the patients in John’s sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg launched the company that bears his name, which would become the world’s largest cereal manufacturer. His resulting wealth allowed him to fund the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

Sources of wealth: Manufacturing; sale of products

Bequeathal of wealth: Relatives; charity

Early Life

William Keith Kellogg was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1860, the seventh of sixteen children born to John Preston and Ann Janette Kellogg. The family, staunch Seventh-day Adventists, firmly believed in the correlation between diet and health. Kellogg failed to distinguish himself as a student and dropped out of school at age fourteen to work in his father’s broom factory. He sold brooms for eight years and then returned to school to study business. After completing a year’s course work in three months, he dropped out again to work for his brother, John H. Kellogg, at the Battle Creek sanatorium. John was a medical doctor, but some of his treatments bordered on quackery and often included daily enemas, cold showers, and health food. In 1880, Kellogg married Ella Davis, with whom he had five children.

First Ventures

One of America’s favorite breakfast cereals came into being when the Kellogg brothers made a mistake. They insisted upon a healthy diet for sanatorium patients, and they wanted to improve upon shredded wheat, the only cold cereal available in 1894. W. K. Kellogg worked long days, sometimes staying late into the night to experiment. One day he prepared cooked wheat to be processed through rollers. He and his brother had urgent business to attend to and forgot about the wheat. When they came back to their experiment two days later, the wheat had completely dried out, leaving them with flakes of wheat, not sheets of dough. After toasting the flakes, they poured cold milk on them, and their taste tests demonstrated that they had created a viable method for making cereal. If this method worked with wheat, they assumed correctly that it would also work with corn. From that mistake came Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes.

W. K. Kellogg recognized the potential of corn flakes as a mainstream breakfast food. His brother, however, wanted the flakes to remain a health food ordered only through his sanatorium’s catalog. After working for his brother for twenty-five years, Kellogg decided to start his own company and sell cereal by the carload, not the carton. A court battle with his brother over the right to market the cereal was ultimately decided in W. K.’s favor, but it caused a permanent rift between the brothers. John later wrote a conciliatory letter to W. K.; unfortunately, W. K.was near death and was never shown the letter.

Mature Wealth

Although Battle Creek had more than thirty companies producing cereals, the Kellogg Company, originally called the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, outpaced them all and in the twenty-first century still commanded more than 40 percent of the world market. General Mills, for years the company’s closest competitor, surpassed Kellogg in 2001.

Although Kellogg was a perfectionist and demanded the same from his employees, he was by all accounts a fair and consistent boss. He expected his business to excel, and he made sure it did. Under his leadership, the Kellogg Company posted profits, even when other consumer product companies suffered bad times or failed. World War I caused shortfalls of railcars and some of the necessary production ingredients, causing the company to sustain the only loss in its history in 1920. During the dark times, both W. K. Kellogg and his son John L. Kellogg worked without pay. Their sacrifice paid off. Soon earnings again soared and Kellogg’s personal wealth grew proportionately.

The company he founded continued to grow. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, his company helped reduce unemployment in the Battle Creek area by instituting six-hour factory shifts, thereby creating additional jobs for community residents. Kellogg also converted ten acres of his factory’s property to a park, where local residents also found work.

The Kellogg Company’s industry domination from its earliest days can be credited to W. K. Kellogg’s mastery of the art of promotion. In 1906, he spent one-third of his initial startup capital on an advertisement in the Ladies’ Home Journal, the most popular women’s magazine of the day. Because there was an abundance of cereal makers, he made sure people bought his brand by making certain that his signature was prominently displayed on the package. He created demand by hiring people to visit grocery stores and ask for Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes even before the product was commercially available. In 1912, he mounted a sign on a Times Square rooftop in New York City that measured 50 by106 inches—the largest electric sign that had ever been displayed. Other marketing ploys included advertisements and packaging with “spokesanimals” and other trademarked characters, such as Cornelius the Corn Flakes rooster and Snap, Crackle, and Pop, the elflike creatures that touted Rice Krispies, in order to enhance brand recognition. Premiums in the cereal boxes further drove sales. In the 1960’s, Tony the Tiger joined the lineup to sell Frosted Flakes, and later Toucan Sam was the mascot for Froot Loops. Children loved the television advertisements and demanded that their parents buy the cereals.

W. K. Kellogg took pride in the fact that his son John was actively involved in the company and had acquired nearly two hundred patents, including one for package liners that kept the products fresh. These patents added to the company’s wealth and to the wealth of its founder. Although Kellogg became one of the world’s richest men, attaining wealth was never his goal. His money meant nothing unless he could use it to improve the lives of others. He cared about the most vulnerable of the world’s citizens—its children—and determined to improve their lives, choosing to focus on the United States, Africa, and Latin America.

Most of his money came from his equity in the Kellogg Company. He provided his family with the lifestyle appropriate for a man of his position, and he then made arrangements for a foundation to carry on the work he held dear: helping the less fortunate by making better use of agricultural resources to ease hunger, expanding access to health care in Third World regions, and fostering education as the way out of poverty.

One venture not initially associated with the cereal company was the Kellogg Ranch in Pomona, California, where Arabian horses were bred. By 1932, the ranch had doubled its size to encompass 750 acres, and it became part of the Kellogg Foundation in 1949.

On October 6, 1951, W. K. Kellogg died of heart failure in Battle Creek, Michigan, his hometown and the site of his phenomenal success. He was ninety-one years old.

Legacy

One of W. K. Kellogg’s legacies is found on breakfast tables around the world. He revolutionized the morning meal. In a rapidly changing world, where men left the farms for city work and women entered the workforce in ever-increasing numbers, heavy, cooked morning meals became a weekend treat, while cold cereal was the weekday ritual. By the twenty-first century, Keebler, Nutri-Grain, Healthy Choice, and Kashi were part of the Kellogg family of foods. The company has facilities in more than 170 countries and employs more than sixteen thousand people worldwide.

Michigan State University operates the Kellogg Biological Station on a site that was once part of Kellogg’s vast property near his beloved city of Battle Creek. The Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek bears his name and honors his contributions to the region.

Kellogg’s sense of responsibility for the underprivileged members of society led him to say, “It is my hope that the property that kind Providence has brought me may be helpful to others, and that I may be found a faithful steward.” That belief motivated his greatest legacy, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, at one time the second largest charitable foundation in the United States.

Bibliography

Gordon, John Steele. The Business of America. New York: Walker, 2001. A collection of essays tracing America’s business history from the first settlers through the Bill Gates era. Details the profound impact large businesses have had on the growth of America.

Hunnicutt, Benjamin. Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1996. Explores the unprecedented measures taken by W. K. Kellogg to keep people employed during the Great Depression.

International Directory of Company Histories. Chicago: St. James Press, 1988-. The directory is updated annually and contains information about Kellogg and other companies.

Lynaugh, Joan E., et al. The W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Nursing Profession: Shared Values, Shared Legacy. Indianapolis, Ind.: Sigma Theta Tau Press, 2007. Describes a partnership between the Kellogg Foundation and the nursing profession in the shared desire to provide health care to children, particularly those in need.

Wawro, Thaddeus. Radicals and Visionaries: Entrepreneurs Who Revolutionized the Twentieth Century. Irvine, Calif.: Entrepreneur Press, 2000. Contains more than seventy accounts of groundbreaking entrepreneurs, including Kellogg.