Who Invented Cornflakes? Two Brothers, One Feud

Cornflakes came out of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan in the 1890s, and two brothers share the credit: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who ran the place and held the patent, and his younger brother Will Keith Kellogg, who turned the flakes into a business. The first flakes were wheat, made in 1894. Corn followed a few years later.

Who invented cornflakes, John or Will?

The honest answer is that nobody agrees. The flaked cereal of 1894 has been described in different ways by John Harvey, by his wife Ella Eaton Kellogg, by Will Keith and by others, and each version gives the teller a bigger part. When John Harvey filed for a patent on 31 May 1895, he filed alone. U.S. Patent No. 558,393, "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same," was issued on 14 April 1896 and named only him. Will Keith spent later years insisting he deserved more credit than he got.

What is solid is the setting. The Kelloggs were Seventh-day Adventists from Battle Creek. John Harvey, a physician, became head of the Adventist sanitarium there while still in his twenties, and he treated patients according to what he called "biologic living": vegetarian food, no alcohol or tobacco, no tea, coffee or condiments, and very little egg or dairy. That account comes from the historian Richard Cavendish in History Today. Patients, he writes, found the diet so monotonous that John Harvey, Ella and Will Keith started experimenting with cereals.

The batch of wheat in 1894

The usual story goes like this. The brothers were trying to make an easily digestible form of bread. A batch of boiled wheat dough was left out, and when they ran it through rollers the next day it came apart into thin flakes instead of one sheet. Cavendish says they stumbled on the wheat flakes "by accident one night in 1894." Later retellings put the lapse down to different causes and different people, and the part about being "called away" belongs to the retellings, not to anything we could check.

They baked the flakes and called them Granose. Cavendish describes it as the world's first flaked cereal product. John Harvey's tempering technique became a basic step in the flaked cereal trade.

When did cornflakes arrive?

Not in 1894. Cavendish dates toasted maize flakes to 1898, with a longer-lasting version in 1902. The sanitarium sold them as Sanitas Toasted Corn Flakes. Cornflakes were not a replacement for the wheat flakes in a single stroke; they were one of several grain products that the family tried out, alongside granola biscuits, peanut butter and a cereal-based coffee substitute.

Granola itself was older. John Harvey had experimented with a baked grain food around 1877. It was first called Granula, but a rival who sold a wheat cereal under that name threatened a lawsuit, and in 1881 Kellogg renamed his version Granola. Anyone reading about "the first breakfast cereal" in Battle Creek should keep the two products apart.

Was it really meant to suppress desire?

This is the part of the story that gets told most loudly, and the evidence is thinner than the telling. What the sources support is that John Harvey followed Ellen G. White, a founder of the Adventist church, and the reformer Sylvester Graham, both of whom recommended bland diets to limit excitement, including sexual arousal. His "biologic living" also preached sexual restraint. So the flakes belonged to a regimen with that aim.

What we did not find is a statement from Kellogg that he invented the cornflake specifically to curb lust. The flakes began as an answer to a practical problem: patients with a dull diet and a need for something easy to digest. The moral purpose lives in the philosophy around the food, and the claim that a single cereal was designed as an anti-aphrodisiac is a tidier story than the record supports.

How the brothers fell out over sugar

John Harvey was not much interested in business. He wanted to reform how Americans ate. Will Keith, whom Cavendish calls taciturn and austere and a born businessman, resented playing second to his flamboyant brother. He bought the rights to make cornflakes from John Harvey, and on 19 February 1906 he founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company.

Sugar was a sticking point. When Will Keith proposed adding it to the flakes, John Harvey refused. That split is widely reported, though the sources we read give only the outline, not a dated argument.

Will Keith spent heavily on advertising. One campaign told readers to "wink at your grocer and see what you get," and what you got was a free sample. Cavendish reports that it raised sales fifteen times over in New York City.

The lawsuit and the name

The brothers also fought over the name on the box. Both used Kellogg. In 1911 Will Keith won a lawsuit giving him exclusive use of the Kellogg name in the United States, and a battle over international use ran from 1916 to 1921. The popular version has John Harvey suing his brother; Cavendish records Will Keith as the one who won.

Others had followed the Kelloggs into the trade. C.W. Post, a former sanitarium patient, made Grape Nuts, based on the granola biscuits, and a drink called Postum patterned on the Kellogg coffee substitute. By 1900 his company was earning $3 million a year. More than forty cereal companies started up in the United States in the early 1900s.

From a sanitarium kitchen to a global name

Britannica says the company adopted the name Kellogg's in 1922, after it began making cereals other than cornflakes. Bran Flakes had gone on sale in 1915 and All-Bran in 1916. In the Second World War the Kellogg plant turned out more than 43 million packages of combat rations for U.S. forces, more on that in the history of military rations.

In 1930 Will Keith gave a majority interest in the company to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. He died in Battle Creek in October 1951, aged 91. For more kitchen discoveries of this kind, see foods invented by accident; for what a morning meal looked like before boxes, read the history of bread.

Questions people ask

Who invented the first cornflakes?

John Harvey Kellogg, head of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, patented flaked cereal in 1896, and his brother Will Keith Kellogg helped develop it and later sold it commercially. Accounts disagree about who did what in 1894. Cornflakes made from maize came in 1898, after the first wheat flakes.

Were cornflakes invented by accident?

According to the usual account, yes. The Kellogg brothers were trying to make an easily digestible bread for sanitarium patients in 1894 when a batch of wheat dough, left out, split into flakes under the rollers. Those first flakes were wheat, called Granose. Corn versions arrived in 1898.

Why did the Kellogg brothers fall out?

Will Keith Kellogg wanted to sweeten cornflakes for a mass market, and John Harvey Kellogg refused to add sugar. Will Keith founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in 1906. They later fought over the Kellogg name, which Will Keith won the right to use exclusively in the United States in 1911.

Who made Grape Nuts, and was it a Kellogg product?

No. Grape Nuts was made by C.W. Post, a former patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium whose cereal was based on the Kellogg granola biscuits. His Postum Cereal Company, which also sold a grain-based coffee substitute, was earning $3 million a year by 1900.

Filed under Accidental Inventions