Kellogg Brothers (Radio Edit)

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1:28learn all about the Kellogg brothers. And to help us, we have two very special breakfast buddies. In History Corner, she's Associate Professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Department of Applied Health Science. You may have read her excellent book, Higher and Colder, on the history of extreme exploration. And you'll definitely remember her from our episodes on Victorian bodybuilding and the Northwest Passage. That's not one episode, it'll be weird if it was. It's Dr Vanessa Heggie. Welcome back, Vanessa. It's great to be back. And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, actor and writer.

1:57You'll know him from loads of television programmes including Mock the Week, QI, Have I Got News for You and Live at the Apollo. Plus he's a staple of BBC Radio 4 shows like The Unbelievable Truth, The News Quiz and The Infinite Monkey Cage. Maybe you've seen one of his amazing live tour shows including the award winning Tragedy Plus Time. That's right, it's Ed Byrne. Welcome to the show Ed. Thank you very much indeed. I feel like I shouldn't even be here when I had toast for breakfast. Ed, your first time on the show. We're delighted to have you in. First question I have to ask, contractually obligated are you a history fan a lover admire it did you like it at school do you partake yeah i mean history at school it's interesting like as an irish person i have massive gaps in what i'm expected to know living in england like anything to do with the british monarchy that people here just take for granted as knowing i'm just absolutely out in the cold and i have and i have no notion of who came where.

2:53I mean, having numbers in the king's names helps. But even having lived now in Britain since the age of 18, I'm determined to keep it as a black spot in my knowledge. Well, today we're talking about America, so you don't have to do any royal stuff. What do you know about breakfast cereal? Have you ever been a breakfast cereal guy? Yeah, totally. Yeah? No, absolutely. And it's one of those ones where if I have even an ordinary breakfast cereal, like crunching the cornflakes, I pat myself on the back for not having a cinnamon swirl. I do feel quite good about myself if I haven't had a fry-up or basically cake.

3:36So, what do you know?

3:42This is the So What Do You Know. This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I think, like Ed, most of you are familiar with the Kellogg's brand. If you eat cereal, like Ed, you're going to recognise their various popular products. They're their mascots that go with them, including Snap, Crackle and Pop. And the iconic Tony the Tiger, he's fine. He's fine. But I'm guessing the history of the Kellogg family specifically might be less familiar, unless you are a serial, serial botherer, or you've seen the 1994 movie The Road to Wellville, starring Anthony Hopkins.

4:14So how did a family feud lead to the creation of such an iconic company? What wellness fads were popular in the late 19th century? And what has yoghurt got to do with it? Let's find out. What's yoghurt got to do with it? The Tina Turner classic that never was.

4:32Dr Vanessa, let's start with the basics then. Who were the Kellogg family? And we've talked about the Kellogg brothers. Which brothers? So the two brothers we're talking about are John Harvey Kellogg, who was born on the 26th of February 1852, and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, born on the 7th of April 1860. But they are part of a large family. Their dad, John Preston Kellogg, had five children with his first wife, Mary Anne, and then 11 with his second wife, Anne Stanley. So John and Will are numbers 10 and 14 for John Preston out of his total of 16 kids. This is back in the day when you used to shoot out a lot of kids.

5:09Especially with two marriages. You were going to lose a couple anyway somewhere in the shop. Spoilers, that's coming up. Yeah. So when John was born in 1852, the family are still trying to make it as farmers in Michigan. But shortly after his birth, they sold the farm, they bought a broom factory. And then in 1856, they moved with their new business to Battle Creek, a small town, which is where Will's born. And while John Harvey is charming and sociable, Will is not those things. He is not as outgoing. His family definitely thought he wasn't as smart as his older brother, John. and the brothers do not have a good relationship.

5:44John physically and verbally bullied his younger brother and he used his storytelling ability to get Will in trouble by telling tales on him when he'd done something wrong. Tragedy struck many times. Mary Ann Kellogg, John Prescott's first wife, dies of tuberculosis in 1841 and amongst the direct siblings of John and Will, four of the 11 of them die, three of them in infancy and one of them is in their early teenage years. And even for those that survive, This is a childhood that's marked out by sickness. John Harvey is a boy. He claimed he had TB that he said lost his use of a lung. Yes, apparently he caught tuberculosis and it made basically one of his lungs, his left lung, completely non-functional for the rest of his life.

6:24And it certainly wasn't the only one of his diseases, I think, perhaps more important to his later life. He really suffered from digestive disorders. He developed colitis. And so he turned to religion. It's not the sort of classic American Baptist or Lutheran. It's something called the Seventh-day Adventist. Yeah, and religion was a huge part of the Kellogg family life. John Harvey's dad, John Preston, there's a lot of familiar names here, so we're going to try and keep them apart. So John Preston was really... Mr. Kellogg. Mr. Kellogg, Mr. Kellogg Senior, was close to the spiritual leaders of the Adventists, and that's Ellen and James White.

6:58Ellen is the person who's really important to shaping the faith because she's regarded as a prophetess. So she has visions that are basically the principles of Adventism. One of those is that the second coming is coming really soon. But the other is how to live a virtuous and healthy life, which is dietary advice, exercise advice, a diet of grains and vegetables. It's vegetarianism. It's no stimulating foods, nothing spicy, nothing fried, nothing pickled, no alcohol, no drugs, but also no wigs, no corsets, no tight dresses. Well, you're not supposed to eat those anyway. I never eat it. You've never eaten a corset, Ed?

7:35You haven't lived. Delicious. I find them very binding. All right, so John Harvey, as a sort of young boy growing into adolescence, he believed that these indulgences, they would lead to what particular indulgence, Ed? Oh, now it's self-pleasure, no? It is, yeah, very good. I mean, eventually all roads lead there. Vanessa, how did Ellen White's spiritual beliefs and her visions influence little John Harvey Kellogg? His relationship with the Adventist church and the faith does have its highs and lows over the rest of his life. He doesn't always stick entirely to her spiritual rules, but he definitely absorbs a lot of these ideas about pure, simple living.

8:18What about formal education? We haven't really heard about school. Kellogg Senior were not that keen on sending their children to school, and that's partly because if you think the second coming is coming, there's not much point in sending your kids to school. but they did get persuaded to send both of them. John starts attending at the age of 10. He's immediately identified as this gifted child. He starts to pursue a career in education but Ellen White had a very different plan for him and in 1872 she persuades him to go and pays for him to go and study medicine at Trull's Hygeo-Therapeutic College.

8:47This is a college that we would probably today say is teaching alternative medicine so hydrotherapy and things like that. So John Harvey attended Dr Trull's Hygeo-Therapeutic but he then has formal training later as well. He was not very impressed with the education he got from Dr Trial. He thought it was a bit of a waste of time and a bit of a, he calls it a bogus diploma and he doesn't ever sort of mention it when he talks about his certificates later on. But he manages to persuade the Whites to continue funding his education and he actually goes and takes some courses in medicine at the University of Michigan and then he manages to go to Bellevue Medical Hospital all the way out in New York City and that's where he's taken as many classes in medicine but also in medical science as he can possibly manage.

9:23Okay, so he's classically trained as a doctor. Yes, he is. And he's alternatively trained. He's technically seen both sides. So, Vanessa, while John Harvey Kellogg is off at med school, little Will is doing what? He's not treated as the brightest kid, but they do still send him to school. They still think it's a waste of time and probably even more for him because he does not do so well academically. Although I think, to be fair, that might be because he's struggling having to go to school with also having a job. So from the age of six, he's working in his parents' broom factory. Oh, my word. And by 12, he's so good at it that he's become a factory floor supervisor for a team of other boys working on brooms.

9:57Yeah, but at the end of the day, nepo, baby. That's the problem with the broom industry. I've always said it. It's sewn up, it is. Well, he may have been better than his dad, actually. At 14, they've got him out on the road selling stuff, and that's really where Will blooms. He is an excellent salesman, but he's also really good at the numbers and good at the maths and good at the business studies and the logistics. So he manages to get to go to Parsons Business College in Kalamazoo, also in Michigan. And this is in 1880, and he therefore qualifies as a bookkeeper and an accountant. So business studies, basically.

10:27Let's get back to John. What did he do with his fresh out of the cereal box medical degree? Did he go and practice medicine? So after his studies, he goes back to Battle Creek and this is what Ellen and James White had planned for him all along. They get him to run their Western Health Reform Institute because it's struggling. That's why they sent him to study medicine in the first place. He reorganises it. He reinvents it. He focuses on what he considers a healthy diet as well as the hydrotherapy that they were already doing. in 1877 he renames it the Battle Creek Sanatorium. I'm saying sanatorium, not sanitarium, because he wanted to distinguish it from the other institutes.

11:02But it quickly becomes nicknamed the San to save any effort. And it thrives. And by 1880 he needs a new manager and so he turns and offers the job to his brother, Will. So John and Will are now working together at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, nicknamed the San. Will is in charge of the bookkeeping, he's the accountant, and John is in charge of the patients, I guess, the health stuff. He's the doctor. Do the brothers now get on? They're now both in their 20s or 30s, I guess. No, things are still really bad between the two brothers. Will had to work at the SAN for seven years doing 18-hour days, including working Christmas, before he was allowed to take two weeks off for vacation.

11:39He's paid really badly and that's partly because the SAN is associated still with the church. So a lot of people are working voluntarily or for low wages because it's church work. How well is John doing out of it at this point? Well, John technically isn't paying himself out of the sand. He is paying himself out of the publications he's putting out and Will is running his publication company. So that's the other side of the business that they're also working on. He's a health author. He's kind of putting out pamphlets and so on. You can't know everything. But why is William doing this? William sounds like he's a very qualified business person.

12:13Why has he gone to work for no money with the brother that he hates and believes in? It's harder to know because it's harder to get access to Will's personal papers than it is John Kellogg, who wrote a lot of his stuff down. The guess would be that it's still family loyalty and also possibly post-traumatic stress from being bullied, but this is what he's used to. This is the relationship he's used to. Sad, isn't it? Let's talk about the treatments you could receive at the Seine. By 1900, this is an incredibly large institution. It has about 700 patients. It has 1 ,000 staff. It has 400 acres of farmland.

12:44It has luxurious suites of patient wings. This is full modern plumbing. It's electric lighting, all of that sort of stuff. It also has a full hospital operating theatre, scientific analysis laboratory. It has an orchestra. It has regular choir evenings for entertainment. You've got to have an orchestra. You've got to have an orchestra. There's all the baths. There's the light baths. There's massive dining rooms. There is a full experimental kitchen. And that's because the real focus here is on the diet. So it's being run on the Seventh-day Adventist principles. So that is vegetarian diet, vigorous exercise, no drugs, no alcohol, no tobacco, no tight corsets, no sex.

13:21And what John thinks is really important is that the food mustn't stagnate inside you. You mustn't have rotting food in your body. It has to pass through really quickly. So you eat this particular diet. And yet spices weren't allowed. Yeah. That would have been easier. Act as an accelerant. So yogurt enemas. Yogurt enemas, if it doesn't come out fast enough, aim for four bowel movements a day. and if all else fails, vibration to put you moving. And chew your food 40 times. Is it Fletcherism, this thing? Yes. So that's named after the health guru, Horace Fletcher. So you have to chew your food, each bite of food, at least 40 times to sort of pre-digest it before it gets into your stomach.

13:55Right, okay. Shoot straight through. Ed, would you have voluntarily gone to one of these health farms? No, I'm a nightmare just even thinking about it. And I'm not, you know, this is going to go out, you know, in the morning on Radio 4. I'm not going to go into detail on the thing that really puts me off at the most. But, yeah, a vegetarian diet. No, thank you. I mean, some of this is kind of sensible science, and exercise, diet, whatever, good, and some of this is bonkers stuff. We have to obviously talk about John Harvey Kellogg's pretty nasty views, which are fairly typical of the era, but he was particularly keen on eugenics, and he went further than some.

14:32Yeah, he was a supporter of eugenics, and this can seem confusing to some people because obviously he's also advocating all these lifestyle diet, nurture side of nature and nurture changes. And also because the SAN itself could look like quite a racially progressive institution. There's no real racial segregation there. He had some very high profile clients, including the abolitionist surgeon of Truth. But he also had African American nurses and doctors working and training there. But he also believed in the supremacy of the white race. And he thought that we should be tactically breeding better men and women.

15:02And these are his words like horses, cows and pigs. So he organises and hosts a series of national conferences on race betterment at the SAAN. The first of these is in 1913. And he's a strong advocate of what we call positive eugenics, but that's where you try and encourage some people to have more kids, but also supported negative eugenics, which is where you try and stop people from having children. Are you going to come to me now for my hilarious take on that? Yeah, Ed, if you could just follow that up with a hilarious banger, that'd be great. I mean, obviously, it's, you know, there's an awful lot of eugenicists in this time of history.

15:36Some of them quite progressive in other ways. So we're talking about food innovators in several ways, which means we need to talk about the breakfast cereal market. Because so far, we haven't really talked about breakfast. And that's why we're here. We're here for breakfast. How, why did the brothers break into the cereal market? So they have an experimental kitchen at the San, which is really useful for them. And John's story, and we have to again take it with a pinch of salt, is that when he's at medical school in New York... Is a pinch of salt allowed? No, no, no, no. A sprinkling of... A sprinkling of oats?

16:06Seeds, yeah. I don't think we're going to popularise that as a new phrase. He's taken with a sprinkling of oats. So John's story about why he got into cereals was that he's looking for no-cook breakfast, basically. He is not the only one. There are a lot of doctors and entrepreneurs who are all trying to think about this same sort of easy breakfast morning product that's also healthy and made of grains and things like that. His key inspiration is probably granular. And granular is this baked whole wheat flour crispy bits that have to be soaked overnight to become edible. So they're not really quick cook.

16:40So John and Will are kind of experimenting with different sorts of flours and grains to try and make an easier version of this. And eventually they have this mix of wheat and oat and corn. They bake at high temperatures, they crumble it up. It still needs soaking for a couple of hours, so it's not immediate, but it's still slightly better. Still less hustle than chia seeds. So how do we get cornflakes? Because I know there are multiple stories of how they come up with it. OK, so the key step for cornflake making here, I'm not going to do too much science, but there's a little bit, which is tempering.

17:08So you soak whatever you're using and then you boil it and then you sort of put it into a sheet. And it's that drying out as a sheet that means that the moisture in it is evened out and it becomes easy to bake and flake. So that's the essential thing. Bake and flake. John's story, happy accident. He's playing about home, gets called away to the sand, forgets what he's working on, leaves it overnight. And when he comes back and tries out, he suddenly realizes, ah, a miracle has happened and now it flakes really easily. And that's the discovery of how you make cornflakes. Will says, actually, it was the two of them deliberately working on it in the experimental kitchen and that the mash was left for a lot longer and had become mouldy, but they didn't want to waste it.

17:46So they tried flaking it, baking and flaking it. And then they realized it worked really well. And then John wrote up a whole series of experiments for him to try and we'll put in 120 hour weeks in order to try and perfect this particular method. I'm going to go with the second one there. I'm going to go with William's version of events. You're going to go with the brothers spending hundreds of hours. Yeah, I'm doing it. I mean, that's how most foods are made, right? Yeah. I mean, that's oftentimes how my dinner is made. Many, many hours spent trying to work on it. Okay, Vanessa, do we have a sort of instant breakfast revolution in America?

18:21Actually, yes. It is a massive boom time for cereal entrepreneurs, basically. So Battle Creek becomes this hub for cereal production by 1900. There's over 100 companies there all trying to make cereals. Some of them are innovating. Some of them are just copying each other. Some of them are literally stealing each other's ideas. And they have quite good names. Yeah. So the ones actually in Battle Creek, some of them are familiar. Grape Nuts are going to come out of Battle Creek. But also the first really sugary cereals like Maple Flakes, which are made with maple syrup to be sweet. but outside of Battle Creek there's ones which have very forceful names like well force Vim and things like that Zest Zest Yes Would you eat Vim?

18:59No no Didn't Vim become that was like a bleach wasn't it? Maybe I feel I feel like But the most crucial thing we have to say of course is they were making these with wheat Yeah And then Will goes hang on a second corn Will really wants to go for nationwide advertising and getting this product out there and John says no I'm not interested It was just that Wheat at the time was the dominant sort of crop. Ah, so no. Will wants them to switch. And when we say he wants them to switch to corn, and we mean maize, just to be emphatic, it's American corn, not British corn. So Will wants them to switch to corn because it's easier to handle and it's sweeter and it just tastes better than wheat.

19:37And John says no, because he thinks wheat is really healthy and that corn is not healthy. Because corn tastes nicer than wheat. And therefore you just, yeah. My wife has a term for things that taste like they're good for you. Tastes very worthy. That's her subtle way of saying, I don't like the taste of this, but I'm sure it's good for me. Could we launch worthy flakes? Worthy flakes, yeah. I'm getting a sense here that the brothers are still at loggerheads. Are they still able to work together? No. Will decides he has enough and he leaves his job at the sand in 1901. Unfortunately, six months later, the sand burns down and he gets roped back into the rebuild, the massive rebuild that John has planned.

20:19Poor Will. He was free. He was free and then he was sucked right back in again. Just one more job. I think I'm out. They pulled me back in. How do we know he wasn't the one who burnt it down? Oh, hello. He definitely got motive. There are many rumours, but it was probably the really complex electric plant just had a bit of a spark. OK, so it burned down. Will came back in. But then he goes on his own. Will launches his own company, which will become known as the company that is now famous as the Kellogg's Company. But that's not what he calls it to begin with. No. So in 1906, February, he launches the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company.

20:51Really catchy name. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I could see why he didn't stick with that. He changes the name of the food he's making to the Sanitas Toasted Corn Flake to Corn Crisp with a K. And then finally Kellogg Corn Flakes. And then he changes the name in the company to Match It in 1909 to Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company, which becomes the Kellogg Company in 1922. quite a lot of rebrands. Yes. He landed on eventually just his own name as the brand name. Was that, had his name become, because of the sanatorium and stuff like that, had his name become a famous name or did the name become famous after the cereal became manufactured?

21:27Great question, right? So the Kellogg name was known as associated with health food products and with the San and with all the publications that John was putting out. But their food company was called the Sanitas Company, not the Kellogg Food Company and this is the source of a lot of the conflict that they had so it would have the Kellogg name on it but that wasn't the brand name they were using yeah and so I mean John being a super chill guy as he was he reacted to his brother sort of launching a rival business in typical fashion he sued him for using what is also his own name right he sued him for control of the family name right what legal framework does he have there because Kellogg Will's called Kellogg he's allowed to use his name yeah exactly yeah a lot of it is to do with the use So the signature on the box and the branding names.

22:10And basically the two brothers get kind of locked into this series of suit and counter suit against each other. And what I think we can probably call some quite petty recriminations. So John starts copying Will's advertising style. And then when John starts making bran cereal, Will brings out all bran and bran flakes in response. Will wins the case out of an out of court settlement in 1911. So he has the right to use the Kellogg brand. but John Harvey doesn't stop with this process and brings yet another suit against him. And then finally, it's not until 1917 when Will actually succeeds in fully winning back the entire brand name.

22:47He can use Kellogg and his brother cannot use Kellogg in the branding anywhere at all. So he wins out in the end. And so if John hadn't sued William, he probably still could have used his name. Yeah, that's true. That was the agreement they reached sort of in 1911 but he continued to pursue to harass about it. How are you feeling about all that bullying now? Yeah, exactly. I feel at this point I should probably do a sort of impartial BBC voice and just say other breakfast cereals are available because my producer Steve... Unfortunately, we have chosen to concentrate on one particular company. OK, where does our story end then for the battling brothers, Vanessa?