The Toasted Corn Flake Company was back in full production by January of 1908. Inside the prosaically named “Building No. 1” were three shifts of white-suited, sanitary workers who made Corn Flakes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with trains at the ready to deliver the freshest, toastiest, crispiest cereals across the nation as quickly as possible.65 It was the first of many modern, technologically driven cereal factories Will Kellogg would erect in the decades that followed. Within six months of reopening, Will was producing many more boxes of Corn Flakes than before the fire. Painted in foot-high letters alongside the factory, so that nearly every passenger on every passing train could see, was the legend “THIS IS BATTLE CREEK.” Upon opening the doors to his new factory in January of 1908, Will told John Leonard Kellogg, his second son and chief assistant, “Now we can turn out 4,200 cases a day and that’s all the business I ever want.” One year later, August of 1909, Kellogg’s was producing and shipping 120,000 cases of Corn Flakes per day.66
The rebuilt “Factory No. 1,” opened in January of 1908 Credit 88
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IN THESE EARLY YEARS of the Kellogg Company, Will improvised each day, learning what worked and discarding what did not. When he began his company there was no handbook or specifically designed machinery that helped Will manufacture cereal. He had to create them.67 Employing the same attention to detail he displayed at the San, Will worked relentlessly at his task.68
He absorbed the best methods of mass production from other industries and shaped them to fit his “cereal assembly line.” He worked with steel mills and oven companies to forge and create massive rotary ovens able to toast larger and larger quantities of Corn Flakes. After a batch of flakes was cooled, new and intricate systems of conveyor belts, like the kinds used in auto factories, transported the finished flakes from the “industrial kitchen” into the boxing room, and dumped them into waiting cartons, unsullied by the hands of his employees.69 Working with printers and packaging experts, he developed machines that folded and glued preprinted pieces of cardboard into cereal boxes. A wonder of modern technology, Will’s cereal factory ultimately housed an assembly line where raw grains traveled a distance of over five miles, “from the time they are received as corn until they are shipped as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.”70
Will and his men worked even harder to develop a national distribution and grocery network. Years later, Will confessed, “I was green when I started the business. I had handled the business affairs of the sanitarium for years, but I did not know the difference between a food broker and a food jobber.”71 (The former is the agent who helps the food manufacturer get his products marketed and sold, typically to food jobbers, who are wholesalers who buy products either from a manufacturer or a food broker and then sell them to grocers for retail sales.) After he opened the second cereal plant, Will traveled around the country, interviewing food brokers, food jobbers, and retail grocers about the best ways to get Kellogg’s Corn Flakes onto the grocery store shelves and into the American public’s stomachs. When he returned to Battle Creek, Will instituted a service department to supply and cultivate relationships with the salesmen along the retail food chain. He formed another to create better means of advertising and marketing. He also kept a close, cold, and calculated eye on the doings of his competitors, from the products they were developing to their monthly sales numbers. And each time Will realized that he had bested his opponent, he indulged in the all too human emotion of Schadenfreude by “sit[ting] in his office and chuckl[ing] for minutes at a time.”72
“The Flaking Department” at Kellogg’s, circa 1915 Credit 89
Like other industrial kings of the era, Will ran his company autocratically, completely, and paternalistically. He suffered few fools gladly and, in every discussion at the plant or in the boardroom, his word was the final one. It was his name on the box and he took that as seriously as if he signed the Declaration of Independence. No deskman ensconced in a fancy paneled office, surrounded by sycophants, Will demonstrated his “ownership” on every level of his ever-expanding business. He loved tackling new challenges that needed to be fixed, revised, or resolved. He routinely walked the factory floors making sure that the conveyor belts, toasting ovens, and other machines were in good working order, and tinkering with them if they were not. He probed his bakers, corn toasters, and boxers about what improvements needed to be made and what procedures needed to be discarded in the cause of profitability. For the men working directly under him in executive capacities, Will quietly demanded to know about every decision and which issues were ignored or dropped and why. When Will asked an employee a question, he retained absolute recall of the query and the employee’s answer. He typically returned to that individual a week to ten days later, repeated his question, carefully listened to the response, and measured the progress made. The theme of his “pop” factory tours and unannounced appearances into an executive’s office was “How can we do better?”
Will’s drive for success might be best described by recalling a company board meeting in the mid-1930s. The featured guest was a prominent business consultant named Robert Updegraff. Much to the chagrin of the executives sitting at the conference table, Updegraff identified a palette of issues requiring attention and change. The Kellogg Company executives’ faces fell to the floor as the consultant described his approach to business administration in one bold sentence: “I am never satisfied that anything is being done as well as it should be done.” Recognizing a kindred spirit in Updegraff, Will stood up from his perch at the head of the table, staring down the seated executives and declared, “Gentlemen, that is what we need in this business—more dissatisfaction.”73
The “Flavoring Department”: “Kellogg’s products win their favor through their flavor,” circa 1915 Credit 90
Will’s cereal company was his life’s work, his main source of joy, and his most reliable source of fulfillment and identity.74 For the remainder of his working life, it seems the company occupied his every waking moment, often at the exclusion of his roles as a father and husband. Still, one cannot help but admire his singular resolve to make Kellogg’s the best of its kind. In his own fashion, he loved, or at least cared deeply about, his factories, his employees, and those who sold his products extending from the men and women working for him in Battle Creek all the way to every grocer who carried them and, of course, every customer who enjoyed them.75
From his early days at the San to his retirement at Kellogg’s, Will recognized the importance of human resources to help him achieve his goals. Like many of his cadre of successful industrialists, he was less than enthusiastic about the labor union movement. Corporate paternalism aside, he paid good wages to his factory workers, his executives, and his support staff but he demanded honesty, integrity, hard work, and accountability. He made certain his factories were clean and provided safe working conditions. He built and maintained adequate restrooms and pleasant dining rooms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner breaks. He also instituted a kindergarten, nursery, and day care center for the children of working mothers (free of charge), full medical, dental, and nutritional “attention” to employees and their families, and a ten-acre, well-coiffed garden surrounding the plant for the enjoyment and recreation of the workers. Most important, he listened to his employees’ gripes and if he agreed that a problem existed, he fixed it.
Even during the most ominous fiscal threats, such as those set in motion by the long Great Depression, Will remained confident and in charge. Instead of trimming his payroll with layoffs, on December 1, 1930, Will took the novel, and humane, tack of instituting four 6-hour shifts for his factories, rather than three 8-hour shifts, so that his entire work force of more than 1,500 men and women remained employed and able to provide for their families. Will kept this workforce in place because he knew everyone had to eat breakfast. What better and more economical way to do that, he asked, than with a 15 cent box of his nutritious, filling, tasty cereal? And the only way to feed the nation its daily breakfast
was to keep manufacturing boxes of Corn Flakes. An impressed President Herbert Hoover, who was contending with a rapidly rising national unemployment rate, invited Will and grandson John Jr. to visit his fishing camp near Winchester, Virginia, for the weekend to discuss the six-hour-shift plan.76 Will Kellogg’s steely resolve, buttressed by his undying faith in his greatest creation—those crispy, toasted, golden Corn Flakes—enabled him to shepherd his company to a gross profit of $6 million (about $110 million today) in 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression, a year when most American companies were struggling to make their payrolls and many others were filing for bankruptcy.
Will learned from his failures as well, such as a sales campaign that almost damaged his beloved Corn Flakes as much as the infamous “New Coke” campaign did to Coca-Cola half a century later. In 1939, when sales of Corn Flakes were stagnating, the Kellogg Company produced a radio show on the National Broadcasting Network about a “club” called “The Circle,” presided over by the suave actor Ronald Colman and featuring as “members” the glamorous Carole Lombard, handsome Cary Grant, and sexy Madeleine Carroll, along with the pianist and conductor José Iturbi, and, for laughs, Groucho and Chico Marx. In concert with a parade of national magazine and local newspaper advertisements, the show’s commercials pitched “a new way to eat corn flakes”—first by heating a tray of the cereal in the oven, then pouring on hot milk or cream, and eating them “piping hot.”77 The result was a disgusting mess, few Americans took to this unwieldy preparation, and the advertisements were quickly dropped. Despite its stellar cast, the radio show never caught on and barely made it through one season. Never again did Will change the mode of eating a bowl of Corn Flakes (with cold milk), let alone the formula that made his flakes so good in the first place.
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WILL KELLOGG STEPPED DOWN from the helm of his company in 1939 at the age of seventy-nine. On April 29 of that year he wrote a letter to his son John Leonard enumerating some twenty-four mistakes he had made over thirty-three years. He ended with a reflective postscript: “Shall be eighty my next birthday and I think it is high time that I get out of business and quit making mistakes.”78 In fact, he had delayed his retirement plans for years because he could not “let go” or find anyone he felt was up to the task of running Kellogg’s. For almost all of the 1930s, Will interviewed and appointed a string of executives to steer his beloved company, only to become exasperated with each one’s failings and, finally, demanding their resignation.79 In 1939, he successfully lured a former Chicago banker named Watson H. Vanderploeg to assume the helm. That year, the company’s profits totaled over $33 million (or $562 million in 2016). Will still kept in close contact with the company and demanded weekly updates on the firm’s progress as well as a daily statement of the cash reserves and orders along with a dedicated phone line to question executives when he saw fit. At the time of his retirement, the Kellogg Company controlled “more than 40 per cent of the business in ready-to-eat cereal within the United States and more than 50 per cent of such cereals sold beyond the borders of our nation.”80
Manufacturing Kellogg’s cereals around the world Credit 91
By all metrics, Watson Vanderploeg was a successful chief executive officer and he ran the company with a fierce determination to increase earnings. In 1948, two years after Will finally stepped down from the board of directors, the Kellogg Company reached a record $100 million in sales (about $983 million in 2016) and in 1956 that number doubled (about $1.74 billion today). When Vanderploeg died at age sixty-eight in 1957 while still holding office, the company manufactured food in three gleaming factories in the United States, as well as plants in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Great Britain and Mexico, and three additional contracted factories in Ireland, Sweden, and Holland. 81 In Battle Creek alone, the company maintained a constant grain reserve of 1.5 million bushels, and each day shipped out more than sixty-five train carloads (roughly 6,500 cubic feet of space, or 190,000 pounds) of cereal. Every twenty-four hours, the Battle Creek plant produced six million boxes of the stuff, one million of them filled with Corn Flakes.82
In the 1950s, after Will’s death, Vanderploeg introduced a succession of sugar-loaded cereals, with unabashed names like Sugar Pops, Sugar Smacks, and, most successfully, Sugar Frosted Flakes. These sweetened grains were aggressively marketed and eagerly consumed, thus initiating a raft of unhealthy practices among all cereal manufacturers and consumers that has only recently begun to diminish because of market demand and a better understanding of the dangerous role processed, sugar-filled foods play in our current obesity epidemic and our overall health.83 Alas, sugar definitely boosted sales (and waistlines) during these years.
Although many refer to the post–World War II era as the atomic age, and, later, the space age, a more historically correct moniker might be the television age. For several years, the Kellogg’s Company licensed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck from the Walt Disney Studio to hawk their products. In 1949, Watson Vanderploeg took the quantum leap by hiring the Leo Burnett Advertising Agency of Chicago to develop an exclusive line of colorful mascots to sell Kellogg’s cereal to children. Burnett had already achieved great acclaim in the advertising world for creating “the Jolly Green Giant” (for the Minnesota Valley Canning Company) and the “Marlboro Man” (for Philip Morris). The frumpy, chain-smoking advertising genius repeatedly hit balls out of the park with a colorful cast of Kellogg characters, including Tony the Tiger (“Sugar Frosted Flakes: They’re Gre-e-e-eat!”); a modernization of the Rice Krispies trio of Snap, Crackle, and Pop; Toucan Sam for Froot Loops; and the rooster on Corn Flakes boxes, “Cornelius.”
Burnett left nothing to chance in his advertising campaigns. He liked to quote his colleague E. L. Bernays, the “father” of public relations and a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who insisted that what people loved most about Will’s cereals was the crunch, which helped people get out their aggressions and angst. Burnett demanded a far more practical approach. He tested every variable and was a maven of data, from analyzing the type of people who watched the shows best suited for sponsorship by Kellogg’s to determining the right colors for the cereal box (“jungle green,” for example, was deemed to be “a strong appetite color”).84 Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the Leo Burnett Agency kept outdoing itself with new creative Kellogg’s advertisements. They included some of the nation’s most popular culture figures, such as Norman Rockwell’s cherubic, All-American portraits, the swimming queen of the Silver Screen, Esther Williams, silly Andy Devine, and even Groucho Marx rolling his eyes at Tony the Tiger.85
The remarkable impact these sales methods had on children and their mothers and fathers cannot be underestimated. In 1949, Kellogg’s paid out $12.5 million (or $123 million in 2016) for television advertisements; by 1951, that number jumped to $128 million ($1.26 billion in 2016). During the 1950s, Kellogg’s sponsored such hit children’s series as the Adventures of Superman (starring the ill-fated George Reeves), The Woody Woodpecker Show, and Howdy Doody. In the 1960s, the company extended its reach by sponsoring the daily children’s program Captain Kangaroo, and every Saturday morning a slate of popular cartoon shows featuring the popular Hanna-Barbera characters Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and Quick Draw McGraw. And to make sure American mothers and fathers were equally entertained and informed about the cornucopia of Kellogg products, the company sponsored Art Linkletter’s House Party, The Garry Moore Show, and You Bet Your Life.86 The combination of great advertising campaigns and the new medium of television proved to be one of the company’s most irresistible, albeit somewhat opportunistic, marketing ploys. Will may not have approved of these methods but he would, undoubtedly, have been gratified to learn that by 1974 Kellogg’s enjoyed $1 billion in sales, a number that doubled to $2 billion in 1980. In 2014, the company made sales of over $14.5 billion and employed more than 29,700 people even as it faces serious market shifts in what consumers want to eat for breakfast.87
You bet your life Groucho Marx likes Sugar Frosted
Flakes! Credit 92
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AFTER SUCH A CIRCUITOUSLY TOLD STORY, it seems worthwhile to circle back to that long-ago November day in 1912. One can easily imagine Will Keith Kellogg standing on the Great White Way, looking up into the sky at his gargantuan “I Want Kellogg’s” electric billboard atop the Mecca Building. He probably had to catch his breath and steady his bounding pulse. What a grand spectacle: his name shining away in big, bright lights on Broadway. For years, he toiled and put all his faith (and future) in his Toasted Corn Flakes. Quietly, and without a hint of conceit, he had even confessed that pending success to a few others, “I sort of feel it in my bones.”88 The giant, electric Kellogg’s sign was an important symbol for Will, a trophy of sorts, for the first of many victories in the years that followed. His once daily existence of servitude and humiliation was behind him, even as the bickering between the Kellogg brothers continued to escalate, and he had experienced, and would experience many more, family tragedies and strife. One can only hope that, on the brisk, sunny morning he first fixed his gaze on the largest electric sign ever constructed, Will was able to crowd out thoughts of John, the San, and even his personal demons inaccurately calling him a lackey. By 1912, Will had found his place in the world. And what a remarkable place it was.
PART IV
Battles of Old Age
Woman getting a workout at the San, circa 1913 Credit 93
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