Corn Flakes Were an Accident at a Health Sanitarium, and the Brothers Never Spoke Again

US558393 was granted to John Harvey Kellogg on April 14, 1896. The title is "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same." It is the patent behind corn flakes, and behind one of the longest-running family feuds in American business.

John Harvey Kellogg was the physician who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, a health institution operated on Seventh-day Adventist principles. He advocated vegetarianism, exercise, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, and — a theme he pursued with unusual intensity — a bland diet, in the belief that rich and spicy food stimulated unhealthy appetites of every kind.

He needed digestible, bland, ready-to-eat foods for his patients, many of whom had poor teeth and worse digestion. He and his younger brother Will Keith Kellogg, who managed the sanitarium's business affairs, experimented constantly.

The accident

The standard account, told by the family, is that in 1894 the brothers left a batch of boiled wheat sitting out — variously attributed to being called away on sanitarium business — and returned a day later to find it stale and tempered.

Rather than throw it out, they ran it through the rollers anyway, expecting a sheet of dough. Instead each softened grain came off as an individual flake.

The stale interval was the whole thing. Letting the moisture distribute evenly through each grain before rolling is what makes flaking possible rather than mashing, and it is the core of what the patent claims. They toasted the flakes, served them to patients, and the patients liked them.

The split

The brothers wanted completely different things from it.

John Harvey saw a therapeutic food and wanted it kept plain, in service of the sanitarium's philosophy. Will saw a mass-market breakfast product and understood that the general public would not buy something deliberately bland. He wanted to add sugar.

The argument was bitter and permanent. Will eventually secured the commercial rights and in 1906 founded what became the Kellogg Company, sweetening the flakes and marketing them aggressively to ordinary households. He was an exceptional marketer, and the company grew enormous.

John Harvey never accepted it. The brothers sued one another repeatedly over the use of the family name and the rights to the product, in litigation that ran for decades. They remained estranged for essentially the rest of their lives, reconciling — if at all — only in old age.

What it started

A competing Battle Creek figure, C.W. Post, had been a patient at the sanitarium, and went on to build his own cereal company. Between them, Battle Creek became the center of an industry that reshaped what the Western world eats in the morning: from cooked porridge, eggs, and meat to a bowl of dry processed grain and cold milk.

That shift began as a health regimen, survived a stale batch of wheat, and split a family in half.

See the original

The full text of US558393 is on patents.us.