Don’t you just hate interruptions? There you are – in the zone – working away, when you suddenly get sidetracked. Picking up where you left off, you make the discovery of a lifetime! Sound familiar? Well it might if you were part of the Kellogg’s cereal empire.
Back in the 1890s, Dr John Harvey Kellogg and his younger brother Will Keith (W.K.) ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, a kind of hospital-cum-health spa. Here, patients were treated (though that’s maybe the wrong choice of word) to a strict vegetarian diet. And it wasn’t just meat that was off the menu. No alcohol, tobacco or caffeine was permitted either!
Preparing one such wholesome meal on August 8 1894, the pair had only gone as far as cooking some wheat, before passing it through rollers, when they were called away by pressing matters of an altogether different kind.
By the time they came back, the wheat was stale. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ thought the brothers, so they ran the tempered wheat through the rollers regardless. Instead of producing the usual long sheets of dough, each grain flattened into an individual flake, which when toasted proved a hit with the patients. And by 1906, with the general public too.
More than a century later, people in 180 countries around the world wake up to a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes®, making this one of the most fortunate fails of all time surely.
You can thank us for interrupting you later!
