The Early Years of American Ready to Eat Breakfast Cereal: The Breakfast Cereal Revolution Until 1930

Post Cereal

     The Postum Cereal Company was the brain child of Charles William Post.  Post's biography is almost completely opposite to Kellogg's.  Post did not excel in school due to a lack of interest, and after just two years he dropped out to join the Springfield Zouaves.  He eventually left the Zouaves as well, and after heading to Texas to try his hand at being a cowhand and opening a hardware store in Kansas and failing at both headed back to his hometown to marry and become a traveling salesman for a corn planter company.  Once more, Post grew restless and quit his traveling salesman job to go into business for himself.  He set about attempting to create a career for himself inventing, creating a seed planter, a bicycle, and a player piano among other things in the process.  Eventually he suffered a nervous breakdown and found himself unable to work for months, a period of time that saw his business ventures fail once more.  Ever the persistent one though, Post found himself back on his feet and once again in extremely poor health after a campaign for a type of suspenders he invented failed spectacularly.
     Post's poor health found him seeking treatment, and hearing of the many success stories that came out of Battle Creek, a frail Post found himself at the doors of Kellogg's Sanitarium.  Unfortunately, Kellogg's many "cures" failed for Post.  The daily enemas, light baths, and diet changes did little to aid Post, whose continuously declining health led Kellogg to gravely inform Post's wife, Ella, that he was certain to die.  Kellogg's bleakness in his prognosis combined with the astronomical rates that Kellogg charged for his services and the depletion of the family's available funds led Post's wife to promptly wheel him out of the Sanitarium to her cousin's house.
     Ella Post's cousin was named Elizabeth Gregory and was a close follower of Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy.  Upon C.W.'s arrival to her home, she began to minister to Post in the Christian Scientist Style.  Miraculously, Post's health began to return that very night.  [Continue Paragraph]
     Following his miraculous recovery, Post decided to open a sanitarium to rival Kellogg's: it would provide similar care, but with more focus on positive thinking, and would also be much, much cheaper than Kellogg's resort.  Like Kellogg, Post looked to improve his patients' health with diet, and served the same type of foods that Kellogg did at his resort.  Post especially liked one food served at Kellogg's sanitarium, a beverage known as "caramel coffee", a cereal based coffee substitute.  Before Post had opened his own sanitarium, he had offered to commercially market the beverage for Kellogg, an offer Kellogg refused.  Post then began to devise his own version of the beverage, hiring a Swiss chemist to design the recipe.  Post sank large amounts of money into the effort, and was completely dissatisfied with the results, so he decided to find the recipe himself, an effort that bought him success.  He called the beverage "Postum", and began to sell it commercially.  Post's fledgling cereal business was about to explode.

 

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