- [Narrator] There are over 1,000 types of cereal
on the market today.
- There's oats, and rice, and wheat,
puffed, and frosted, and toasted,
sugared, and fruity, and chocolatey.
[energetic music]
It's mind boggling.
- [Narrator] But a hundred years ago,
the only name in breakfast is Kellogg.
- Will Kellogg changed the way we eat breakfast
with an affordable and convenient,
ready-to-eat, cold cereal.
- [Narrator] Until an unlikely rival
challenges the king of cereal.
- You wanna go up against Kellogg?
- [Narrator] Igniting a decades-long battle.
- Yes, sir.
- Bell has never made a cereal before.
But to him, step one is taking on
the biggest cereal maker in the world.
[cereal box banging]
- Will Kellogg had fought tooth and nail.
And you don't stay king of the industry by standing still.
- [Narrator] Using new innovations.
- A puffing gun
[gust of air]
created a whole different category.
- It wasn't just like any regular cereal.
It had a kick to it
- [Narrator] That heightened the senses.
- It's crackling.
We have a cereal that talks.
- He had an opportunity to turn breakfast cereal
into something it had never been before, which is fun.
- It smelled like candy
and it tasted like nothing else on the market.
- [Narrator] And launched a new age of advertising.
- The first ever athlete
to be featured on the Wheaties box was Lou Gehrig.
- [James Ford Bell] Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions.
- [Narrator] And the result,
the most popular cereal in the world.
- Who would've thought that a cold oat cereal
would be the mega- hit that it was?
- [Narrator] And a beloved $22 billion industry.
- The intense rivalry between Will Kellogg
and James Ford Bell
changes the cereal industry as we know it.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] Since launching in 1906,
Kellogg's Corn Flakes have been the number one cereal
in America.
- For the last 15 years,
Kellogg's greatest rival was C. W. Post,
who produced Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties.
Even Quaker Oats got into the cereal game.
But none of these companies could truly compete
with Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
- [Narrator] But in 1921, an unexpected challenger
is about to emerge.
[rhythmic music]
James Ford Bell is an eager, rising executive
at the Washburn-Crosby Flour Mill.
- James Ford Bell is the son
of the former president of the mill.
And he's paid his dues, having worked up
from a lowly salesman all the way to vice president.
- [Narrator] The Washburn-Crosby
is one of the top four flour mills in the world.
- They created the same Gold Medal Flour
that you still see in supermarkets today.
- [Narrator] Sales have hit an all-time low.
- Washburn-Crosby is right on the Mississippi River.
And it's using initially water power.
- But with the rise of electricity,
making it possible to open mills anywhere in the country,
new competitors start springing up.
- [Narrator] Bell sees the writing on the wall
for a company whose sole product is wheat flour.
- So I think that might have put
a little bit of pressure on him
to think about the future and diversify their products.
And so James Ford Bell was really looking
for the next big thing.
- [Narrator] Bell hears about a physician
at a local sanitarium
who's created his own whole grain wheat flaked cereal.
[rhythmic music]
- Physicians at sanitariums
would oftentimes curate extremely strict diets
and exercise regimens for their patients
and would create their own recipes.
- [Narrator] These dishes are typically vegetarian,
often high in fiber, and rarely designed for taste.
- So usually this was not food you wanted to eat.
It was food you were told to eat.
But he eats one.
It's a delicious, crispy flake.
And he realizes this could be something incredibly special.
- Kellogg's Corn Flakes, they're very popular
in large part for their flavor and their texture.
This product is different because it's made out of wheat
and it has a little bit of a different flavor.
- And what did you say that you called this?
- Wheat flakes.
- James Ford Bell immediately starts thinking
how can he leverage this product for Washburn-Crosby?
He sees the possibilities
in a wheat flake for the American market.
- Cereal is immensely popular at the time.
If Bell wants to diversify beyond
simply making wheat flour,
a wheat cereal is a great idea.
- [Narrator] Bell buys the recipe from the physician
and tasks his head miller with refining the recipe
to make it more palatable for the American public.
- The problem with whole grains
is they tend to be a little dry and gritty.
- They were trying dozens of varieties
of different types of wheat,
trying different ways of processing it,
going about it in a very methodical way
to really discover what was gonna give the best flavor.
[footsteps on stairs]
- [Narrator] After months of trial and error,
Bell's team presents 36 different recipes.
[rhythmic music]
[light crunching]
- Eight.
[cereal crunching]
[bright music]
[cereal crunching]
- 14.
This one.
This is it.
- Bell decides that he can be a legitimate competitor
to Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
Now remember, his company has never made a cereal before.
But to him, step one is taking on
the biggest cereal maker in the world.
- [Narrator] Now all Bell has to do
is convince the mill's board of directors.
[rhythmic music]
- You wanna go up against Kellogg?
- Even if we were to only carve out
just a small, tiny fraction of the cereal market,
I mean, we are talking
about hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
- And you're willing to stick your neck out on this?
- I am.
Yes, sir.
- All right, I'll talk to the rest of the board.
- Bell is eventually able to convince the rest of the board
that it's worth the risk.
They realize how much money Kellogg is making
and they all want a big old bite of that bowl of money.
- [Narrator] In 1923, the Washburn-Crosby Company
invests in a factory to put their wheat flakes
into production.
But back in Battle Creek, Michigan,
the king of cereal, Will Kellogg,
is also hard at work trying to keep his crown.
- You don't stay king of the industry by standing still.
Will Kellogg needs to expand beyond corn flakes.
[cereal crunching]
- Hmm.
[suspenseful music]
- 1923 is one of those kind of interesting years
in cereal development, when you have two companies
working on essentially the same product,
but they don't know that the other company is working on it.
- [Narrator] In 1923,
Kellogg's beats Washburn-Crosby to market
with their own wheat cereal, Pep Flakes,
hitting store shelves with a marketing campaign
in magazines and newspapers nationwide.
- Pep was essentially just a wheat-based version
of the Corn Flake recipe.
Pep was higher in fiber, but Corn Flakes tasted better.
- [Narrator] Just months later in 1924,
with no choice but to go head to head with Kellogg,
Washburn-Crosby Wheat Flakes hits the market.
- That sounds more like a law firm than it does a cereal.
- [Narrator] But sales are dismal.
- I think what Washburn-Crosby had going against them
is they didn't have the same name recognition as Kellogg.
- Pep Flakes is more popular
because Kellogg's name is on the box.
People know and trust the brand already.
- [Narrator] Now, with an unpopular cereal
further weakening the struggling mill, Bell is desperate.
- He thinks it's a better product than Kellogg's.
He thinks it's just a matter of marketing
to get people to try their Wheat Flakes and be convinced.
- [Narrator] In a Hail Mary move,
Bell decides to rename the flailing cereal.
- What does he decide to do?
Open it up to the company.
Let's have a vote on what the best name could be.
- Gold Medal Wheat Flakes?
It's from Paul at accounting.
- No.
- Okay.
How about this one?
Nutties.
- What, no.
Come on, Nutties is confusing.
[Don chuckles]
What is it?
- You're not gonna like it.
- Why not?
- Because I like it, which means you won't.
[suspenseful music]
- Very similar naming convention to a bunch of other stuff
that's happening in the early 20th century,
like Theodore Roosevelt becomes Teddy.
Instead of moving pictures, they become movies.
- Wheaties.
- [Narrator] And soon, the newly-rebranded Wheaties
will ignite a decades-long battle for cereal dominance,
pitting Bell's struggling flour mill
against Will Kellogg's cereal empire.
- [Narrator] It's been more than a year since James Ford Bell
renamed his cereal Wheaties.
But sales have not improved.
- They invested a lot of money and a lot of effort
into creating Wheaties, but it really isn't catching on yet.
And so the board of directors
is really starting to get angry,
losing their patience over it.
- [Narrator] Bell and company treasurer Donald Davis
call an emergency meeting
with the head of marketing, Samuel Gale.
- Sorry I'm late.
- Samuel Gale is a young man.
And believe it or not, by age 30,
he's already seen as an advertising wizard.
Samuel is the one who created Betty Crocker
in an attempt to sell more Gold Medal Flour,
where this fictional character would give baking advice
to bakers and housewives all over the country.
- [Narrator] And now, he's in charge
of the Wheaties account.
- We're pulling Wheaties.
- You're kidding.
- The board wants to cut their losses,
and I can't blame them for that.
- Okay, can I just say it's actually exceeding projections
in certain markets.
I mean, specifically, where we've had a radio push, it-
- Sam, listen. The decision has already been made.
[suspenseful music]
- How much time have we got?
- Why?
- [Narrator] Samuel Gale has a marketing idea
that has never been done before.
[suspenseful music]
In 1926, home radios reach record sales
of $430 million,
up from $60 million just five years before.
- But there wasn't a lot of advertising on early radio.
A lot of it was sponsorships,
where the host would just kind of read,
you know, this show is sponsored by X, Y, Z company.
- [Narrator] Hoping to leverage the popularity of radio,
Gale assembles a barbershop quartet
to sing a short song written specifically for Wheaties.
It's what we today call a jingle.
♪ Have you tried Wheaties
♪ They're whole wheat with all of the bran ♪
- The Wheaties Quartet is made up of four men
who have completely regular day jobs.
One worked in the printing industry, one's an undertaker,
one's a court bailiff,
and the fourth had some sort of connection
to a local grain company.
- These early days of radio,
they did not really have great recording facilities.
So every time the jingle was to appear on the air,
the barbershop quartet would have to show up
at the radio station and sing it live.
- [Narrator] The Wheaties jingle debuts over the airwaves
on December 24th, 1926.
- It's the first jingle to advertise a product,
and it becomes incredibly popular.
It really spreads the Wheaties name
much farther than conventional advertising.
- [Narrator] Sales of Wheaties skyrocket,
saving the cereal and the flour mill
from failure.
- Kellogg's is still number one,
but the success of Wheaties turns Washburn-Crosby
into a formidable challenger to Kellogg's.
- [Narrator] And it earns James Ford Bell
a promotion to company president.
But Bell now faces a new challenge.
- The jingle really helps Wheaties become so successful
that they just don't have the facilities
to produce enough Wheaties to ship across the country.
Washburn-Crosby can't keep up with demand.
- Bell doesn't wanna lose momentum,
but building new factories
takes a lot of time and resources.
It could take years, and he does not want that.
- [Narrator] He'll have no chance of
keeping up with Kellogg
unless he makes a bold move.
[rhythmic music]
On June 20th, 1928, Bell orchestrates
an unprecedented campaign,
convincing dozens of competing mills across the country
to merge together to form a new conglomerate
and ensuring a steady supply of wheat.
- Joining together made them stronger,
made them have more access to capital.
So they start expanding across the country.
Mills in Texas, and California, in the Northeast,
and Oregon, all throughout the Midwest.
- [Narrator] Bell appoints himself president
of the newly formed General Mills.
And overnight, General Mills
becomes the largest flour milling operation in the world.
- Now, with access to all these mills,
he can churn out boxes of Wheaties nationwide
and go head-to-head with his main competitor,
which is Kellogg's.
- [Narrator] Back at Kellogg's,
with the new General Mills conglomerate
breathing down his neck, Will Kellogg knows he needs
to make a radical move.
- Kellogg starts thinking kind of creatively
and starts expanding into another grain.
- With flake cereals like Wheaties
expanding in the market,
Kellogg wanted to come up with something different
and innovative to stay relevant and on top.
- [Narrator] Kellogg gambles
that he can stay ahead of General Mills
by venturing away from conventional flaked cereal.
- They start producing a cereal made out of rice.
- There had been rice cereals before,
but they're not super popular
because nobody's figured out
how to make a good rice cereal yet.
- The recipe that Kellogg came up with
involved cooking the rice in malt syrup,
rolling it out, and letting it dry
so that the flavors can intensify,
and then baking it until it becomes light and crispy.
[cereal crackling]
- [Narrator] And the result is something unheard of.
- Do you hear that?
It's crackling.
- When you pour milk on it,
the milk actually begins to break down
the structural integrity
of the walls of the air pockets within the rice.
And as they collapse, they begin to make certain sounds.
- We'll fix that.
- Fix that, are you crazy?
Do you know what we have here, huh?
We have a cereal that talks.
- The fact that it made sound was totally unintentional,
but Will Kellogg saw this as an opportunity
to have the cereal stand out
from everything else that was on the market.
- He recognized that he had an opportunity
to turn breakfast cereal
into something it had never been before, which is fun.
- [Narrator] Kellogg's Rice Krispies
hits the shelves in 1928.
Playing on the recent rise of talkies at the movie theaters,
it's marketed
as the talking cereal.
- It makes noise when you pour the milk on it.
And it really, for that reason,
appeals to children in a way
that some of the other major cereals at the time did not.
- [Narrator] Capitalizing on its popularity with kids,
Kellogg's sponsors America's first children's radio program,
"The Singing Lady,"
and releases their own radio jingle for Rice Krispies,
featuring the phrase.
♪ Snap, crackle, and pop
- So a South Dakota illustrator
was listening to a radio advertisement,
and he heard that snap, crackle, and pop,
and he was inspired.
So he created these three elf-like characters,
and he sent them blindly unsolicited
to the Kellogg's ad agency.
- They're from some cartoonist named Vernon Grant,
submitted them on spec.
- Ask him what he wants for these and pay it.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] Named Mr. Snap, Mr. Crackle, and Mr. Pop,
the three mascots make their debut in 1933,
appearing in ads and on the cereal boxes themselves.
- They were all charming.
They are the OG progenitors of these incredible characters
that you associate with your favorite cereal.
- So the fun thing about the Rice Krispies characters
is of course Snap, Crackle, and Pop
are onomatopoeias, right?
They're words that sound like the noises they make.
So when they start to market it in other countries,
they adopt onomatopoeias for those same sounds
in those other languages.
In Finnish, it's Riks, Raks, Poks.
- Piff, Paff, Puff in Swedish.
- Pim, Pum, Pam in Spanish.
- And one of my favorites, in German,
it's Knisper, Knasper, Knusper.
- Polls actually tell us that more Americans
can identify Snap, Crackle, and Pop
than can identify a single Supreme Court justice.
- [Narrator] In 1934, as Kellogg continues
to devour General Mills' market share,
James Ford Bell is determined not to fall behind,
creating his own mascots with real-life inspirations.
[energetic music]
- Americans have always looked up to athletes,
real-life superheroes.
General Mills knew this by putting these athletes
on Wheaties boxes, they could capitalize on their fame.
- Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions.
[triumphant music]
- The first ever athlete to be featured on the Wheaties box
was actually Lou Gehrig, the Yankees baseball player.
It's a pretty big deal.
- So the message that they are saying to kids
is, look, Lou Gehrig must eat Wheaties.
And if you wanna grow up big and strong
and a great baseball player like Lou Gehrig,
you gotta eat Wheaties.
- [Narrator] The Breakfast of Champions campaign
sparks a surge in sales and creates a lasting brand legacy.
- You know you made it when your face
is on the Wheaties box.
Who doesn't want their face on a Wheaties box?
I want my face on the Wheaties box,
but I don't think that's happening.
- [Narrator] In 1936, General Mills goes even further
to market Wheaties and sponsors radio broadcasts
of Major League Baseball games.
- At the time, baseball broadcasts were pretty sporadic.
So what Wheaties did was offer Major League Baseball
a consistent radio presence
in exchange for advertising for Wheaties.
- These radio broadcasts extend beyond Minneapolis
to 95 other radio stations and teams throughout the Midwest.
- It's strange to think about, but Wheaties and General Mills
kind of launched modern sports broadcasting.
- [Narrator] But it also sets the stage
for the rise of an unexpected star.
- They have a contest for the best sportscaster.
And this young man who goes by the name Dutch wins.
And so they fly him out to California
to watch the Cubs at their spring training.
And while he's on California, he figures,
hey, let me go do a screen test for Warner Brothers.
That person named Dutch is Ronald Reagan,
who goes on to become a movie actor
and eventually one of our American presidents.
- [Narrator] But while Kellogg's and General Mills
battle each other, the rest of the nation is struggling,
enduring the worst economic depression
in its history. - During the Great Depression,
thousands of businesses fold.
One in four Americans are unemployed
and people are really struggling to put food on the table.
- It's really difficult to get proper nutrition
when food is scarce and when it's stretched
with fillers like cornmeal and breadcrumbs.
- [Narrator] And cities see a sudden rise
in debilitating diseases like pellagra and rickets.
- Rickets cause deformed bones, particularly in the legs.
Bow-legged children was a common occurrence at that time.
Pellagra is a disease that attacks your skin.
So you get lesions on your skin.
It can ultimately lead to death.
- [Narrator] But a monumental discovery
will transform breakfast and the health of Americans,
with Bell and Kellogg leading the charge.
- [Narrator] By the mid 1930s, with the Great Depression
in full swing, access to healthy foods for many is limited,
causing a rise in diseases like rickets and pellagra.
- So these were incredibly serious diseases
that were disabling and, in some cases, killing people
who weren't getting the nutrients they needed.
- [Narrator] The culprit is a diet lacking
in a kind of nutrient only recently identified, vitamins.
- It seems shocking, but vitamins A, B, C, and D
were all discovered between 1910 and the 1940s.
- Scientists start to realize that pellagra is caused
by a deficiency in vitamin B
and rickets by a deficiency in vitamin D.
- [Narrator] In an effort to eradicate rickets,
scientists across the country
raced to develop and patent methods of fortifying milk
with vitamin D.
- Milk was chosen as the ideal food to fortify
because it was cheap, it was readily available,
and it was already enjoyed
by millions of children nationwide.
- A team in Chicago actually patents a process
using an electrical charge,
which turns fungal cells in milk into vitamin D.
- [Narrator] And James Ford Bell,
president of General Mills,
wants to get a piece of the action.
- Bell figures there's no reason
to mess with the Wheaties brand.
I mean, it's a gold mine.
So why not create something new?
- [Narrator] And he surveys the public for inspiration.
- All right, I'll have to call you back.
No, Don just walked in.
[receiver hits cradle]
- [Don] The market research you asked for.
- Bell conducts a study to find out
what the public thinks about cereal
and what it wants from the product in the future.
He's looking for clues on how to improve
an already popular product.
- There is one complaint that kept popping up.
They want a cereal that doesn't get soggy.
- All cereals get soggy.
- Well, not all cereals.
- [Narrator] A turn of the century invention
may be the key to creating a new type of cereal
that can be fortified
and won't get soggy.
- There is a botanist named Alexander Anderson.
He has something called a puffing gun,
which is something that he's using
in experiments with grain.
- Now he's got these sealed test tubes with wheat flour,
and he's putting them into this vacuum-sealed chamber
and heating them up to 500 degrees.
And he realizes when he hits that chamber with a hammer,
the fluid that's in there like explodes out.
And what you get is this really interesting result.
You get this very nicely textured piece of puffed wheat.
- So General Mills said, that's it,
that is how we make a cereal
that's going to be impervious to the sog.
Let's make a cereal that's gonna retain its texture
even if it's in any kind of milk.
- [Narrator] General Mills' engineers
and physicists design and construct
a puffing gun of their own.
- So General Mills
starts to develop a product with corn,
but they're not doing it
in sort of the traditional staid way
that everybody else has been doing it before.
They're just trying to keep it more interesting,
you know, a little more cutting edge.
- If they can pull it off, Bell is hoping
that a vitamin-fortified puffed corn cereal
is gonna be their next big hit.
- [Narrator] But the puffing gun technology
is potentially dangerous.
For the puffing gun to work,
it requires a vacuum-sealed chamber and a violent explosion.
- You might wanna stand back.
[upbeat music]
[suspenseful music]
[rhythmic music]
- [Narrator] In 1937, engineers at General Mills
develop an experimental puffing gun.
- You might wanna stand back.
- [Narrator] Attempting to invent a new type of cereal
unlike anything they've ever done before.
[hammer clanging]
- So they take cornmeal and they essentially fire it
out of a cannon.
- Did it work?
- You tell me.
[exuberant music]
- He gets this very nicely textured piece of puffed corn,
and it's something no one's ever done before.
And it's pretty amazing.
- [Narrator] The result is corn cereal reimagined.
- The puffing gun created a whole different category.
You had spheres that were crispy
and just totally changed the cereal game.
- [Narrator] They then sprayed the puffed corn
with a lightly sweetened mixture of vitamins B and D,
creating the first vitamin-fortified cereal,
with a name that packs a punch.
- General Mills names the cereal Kix
because it wasn't just like any regular cereal.
It had a boost of vitamins, which means it had a kick to it.
- Even if you look at the nomenclature,
the naming of the cereals,
it was all about the grain and the healthfulness.
So it was Rice Krispies, and Corn Flakes, and Wheaties.
- So it has a fun name,
but unlike most cereals at the time,
which took their name from their ingredients.
If you introduce a cereal called Kix,
that's a little risky, right?
- [Narrator] In 1937, General Mills debuts Kix,
with an ad campaign declaring their new cereal
is taking America by storm.
- In their advertising, General Mills says
that their cereal will be much better for you
than another well-known corn cereal,
which of course is Corn Flakes.
- [Narrator] And for the first time,
Will Kellogg begins to see General Mills
as a formidable threat.
- At this point, Kellogg's is truly dominating
the cereal industry,
and then suddenly General Mills comes out of nowhere,
with their Wheaties and Kix,
and start stealing huge market share from them.
Obviously, if you're Kellogg's, you are worried.
- [Narrator] Determined to compete with Kix,
Kellogg fast tracks a vitamin-fortified version
of his Pep Flakes, releasing it just months later in 1938.
Soon after, the American Medical Association
endorses the addition of vitamins into foods.
- And it becomes commonplace in America for B vitamins
to be be added into grains, D into milk,
and iodine into salt.
- [Narrator] And once common diseases
like pellagra and rickets soon begin to disappear.
- Maybe kids still weren't getting
enough fruits and vegetables,
but because of this fortification,
now they weren't getting these diseases
because they were at least getting enough
of those vitamins and minerals
because they're eating their cereal every morning.
- The thing I think that vitamin fortification
does for American health
is it really allows us to eliminate
a lot of these vitamin deficiencies
in a way that's pretty accessible for ordinary people.
And even today,
cereal is one of the most common sources
of vitamins for ordinary Americans.
- [Narrator] By 1941, sales of Kix are booming,
earning James Bell another promotion,
this time to chairman.
Succeeding him as president is his top lieutenant,
Donald Davis, who's determined to make his mark
by spearheading his own groundbreaking new cereal.
- Donald Davis has been in Bell's shadow
throughout the creation of Wheaties and Kix.
And so he wants something that'll create
his own legacy in the cereal industry.
[footsteps on stairs]
- Everyone loves oatmeal,
but no one has figured out how to serve it cold.
- [Narrator] Hot oats, or oatmeal,
has been enjoyed by Americans since 1877.
By 1941, Quaker Oats is making an average
of $15 million a year with a cereal you make
by simply adding boiling water.
- People were perfectly content with hot oatmeal.
It was super successful.
And, you know, at the time, making it cold,
that was pretty weird.
It's crazy.
- But that puffing gun that they had
brought about new ideas and opportunities.
- [Narrator] The team experiments
with over 500 different puffed oat recipes.
- So the recipe that they landed on was really simple.
It was oats, water, and a little bit of sugar.
- They just needed to decide on a shape.
They don't want it to be confused with Kix
and that unique sphere,
so they needed to come up with a new shape.
- They tried a bunch of different ones,
squares, stars, dumbbells,
until they finally landed on the O.
- The O shape worked perfectly
because it didn't get as crushed
when you put it in packaging for shipping
and it still had a unique shape.
- The first ready-to-eat, puffed oat cereal,
- You got a name?
- [Narrator] The cold oat cereal
known for its iconic O shape
will one day become
the bestselling cereal brand in America.
- CheeriOats.
- [Narrator] On May 1st, 1941 General Mills' CheeriOats
debuts as the first ready-to-eat puffed oat cereal.
- CheeriOats has a musical sound to it.
- General Mills decided to name the cereal CheeriOats.
CheeriOats, it's both food and fun.
- [Narrator] In its first year alone,
CheeriOats sells over 21 million boxes.
- Who would've thought that a cold oat cereal
would be the mega hit that it was?
Now you didn't have to spend half an hour
laboring over the stove cooking oatmeal.
It's ready-to-eat.
And just like Kix, it's vitamin-fortified.
- [Narrator] And along with Wheaties and Kix,
the success of CheeriOats further weakens Kellogg's grip
on the cereal market.
But victory is short-lived.
- [Radio announcer] We interrupt this program
to bring you a special news bulletin.
The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air,
President Roosevelt has just announced.
- [Narrator] Just six months later,
in December of 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
forces the United States to join World War II.
Under orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
many resources are diverted to the front lines,
including metal, paper, rubber, and food.
- During World War II, the United States government
started to ration food.
So now there were limits on how many eggs,
and milk, and beef, and fish, and poultry
Americans could purchase.
- The big food manufacturers leveraged all of their resources
to help feed the war machine.
Hershey's, Heinz, Mars, Coca-Cola,
they all shipped their products to the frontline,
to soldiers in the trenches.
- [Narrator] Kellogg's repurposes
their massive cereal plants for the war effort
and produces much needed rations for soldiers overseas.
- Kellogg's sends 43 million packages
of daily food combat rations for the US Army.
- [Narrator] General Mills also joins the fight,
building precision weaponry for the military,
including the Jitterbug torpedo for the navy.
- It's the first torpedo that can make a U-turn,
and a cereal company created that.
That's really incredible.
- [Narrator] And they produced army rations
with their latest product.
- CheeriOats' unique round shape is actually very useful
to the US Army.
Most of the food products break during shipping,
but not these, and the army used them for rations.
- [Narrator] Thanks to Kellogg's
and General Mills' efforts, among others,
the United States earns a reputation in the trenches
as the world's best-fed army.
And on September 2nd, 1945,
World War II finally comes to an end.
But General Mills is about to become embroiled
in a new battle.
[rhythmic music]
[letter crinkling]
- What is this?
- It's a cease and desist.
We're being sued by Quaker Oats.
- [Narrator] The Quaker Oats company is asserting
that it holds commercial rights to the word oats.
- Quaker felt it was an infringement on their brand,
which is a pretty wild claim
considering that oats are part of the recipe.
- Quaker had to be jealous of General Mills.
They've released a successful cereal using oats,
which is Quaker's bread and butter.
- [Narrator] And General Mills' Chairman James Ford Bell
is forced to make a difficult decision.
- He can either fight a costly legal battle
to keep the name or he can just change the name
and lose all the brand recognition
he's gained over the war.
- [Narrator] In a risky move,
Bell decides to rename the brand.
- So instead of trying to fight it,
General Mills decides to just drop the oats part of it.
♪ Cheerios
- [Announcer] Yes, Cheerios, the cereal
that's shaped like a little letter O.
- It had a little disclaimer in the box that just said,
formerly known as CheeriOats.
It's very simple, very elegant,
got the message across to consumers.
There was no confusion.
- [Narrator] Sales soar under the new name,
climbing past Kix and Wheaties
to become General Mills' best-selling cereal.
And for the first time, Kellogg's Corn Flakes
is dethroned as the number one cereal
in America by Cheerios.
- Will Kellogg was the king of cereal.
And to lose that title must have been infuriating.
[cereal box banging]
[rhythmic music]
- [Narrator] In 1951, after decades on top,
Will Kellogg's Corn Flakes
has been dethroned by General Mills' Cheerios.
But Kellogg sees a path to redemption
that will change the face of cereal.
- It's called the baby boom.
After the war, there are a record
4 million babies born every year,
and the kids' market was becoming an untapped gold mine.
- These baby boom kids,
they want sugar this, sugar that.
Sugar is king in the 1950s,
and that's all that they want.
- [Narrator] Thanks in part
to the sugar industry's PR campaign
to portray sugar as healthy.
- Sugar was being marketed and pushed.
It was viewed as a positive thing.
Not only was it a legitimate hook to get kids to eat it
because kids love sweet,
sugar at that time was viewed
as a great way to get kids to be energized.
I mean, the sugar rush was seen as a good thing
in the 1950s.
- You can't underestimate the irony
that cereal started out as a health food,
something that was supposed to make you strong,
and vigorous, and athletic, and also regular.
And then, next thing you know,
all we're looking down the barrel of is
sugar, sugar, sugar.
- [Narrator] In a desperate move
to outmaneuver James Ford Bell,
Will Kellogg begins reformulating the very recipe
that made him the king of cereal.
- Will Kellogg thought that
by adding sugar to Corn Flakes
their original product,
their flagship brand, was a way to interest kids.
And this would be a way
to finally bring Cheerios down a peg
and become the number one cereal once again.
- [Narrator] Kellogg adds a thick sugary glaze
onto his iconic Corn Flakes.
- Kellogg's Corn Flakes
was one of the most popular cereals in America,
had been for decades.
And introducing a sugared version of that
is a potentially risky move
and harming all that you've built.
It's not dissimilar to introducing New Coke
when everyone loves the old Coke that you had, right?
- [Narrator] But Kellogg never sees his gamble pay off.
On October 6th, 1951, Will Kellogg passes away
in his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan.
- Will Kellogg was known
as the King of Breakfast.
And his legacy on how we eat breakfast today
is really mind boggling.
- To this day, millions of Americans
still start their day with one of his products.
- [Narrator] The year after his death,
Kellogg's sugar-coated cereal hits the market
with the word sugar directly in the name.
- Sugar Frosted Flakes, there is nothing subtle about it.
But now that vitamin-enriched cereals
have nearly eradicated most nutritional diseases,
Kellogg is convinced that sugar is the next frontier.
- [Narrator] To target kids, Kellogg's ad agency
creates a cartoon character
to appear in America's hottest new medium, television.
- [Tony the Tiger] Sugar Frosted Flakes are great.
- [Narrator] His name is Tony the Tiger.
- They have another mascot to go along
with Snap, Crackle, and Pop.
They invent Tony the Tiger.
"They're great!" is the slogan they use.
And they are really marketing directly toward children
with these mascots.
- Kellogg's goes all in,
spending over a hundred million dollars on TV ads.
That's more than a billion dollars today.
- Since the '50s, you've got 20 million American kids
watching "Howdy Doody," all these cartoons.
It was a brilliant piece of marketing.
- [Narrator] In 1952, Sugar Frosted Flakes
flies off the shelves,
but fails to overtake Cheerios
as America's bestselling cereal.
- Will Kellogg is a super successful entrepreneur.
However, a lot of entrepreneurs are like athletes,
where sometimes their loss hurts more than their wins.
And losing the title of King of Cereal to Cheerios
is something he was never okay with.
- [Narrator] And to add insult to injury,
James Ford Bell has one last trick up his sleeve.
- Bell uses the puffing gun technology
to create a brand new cereal
unlike any other that's out there.
It's the first colorful fruit-flavored cereal.
- So Kellogg's was just adding sugar to cornflakes.
General Mills created a whole new cereal.
- [Narrator] In 1954,
General Mills' eye-catching, sugary cereal
hit store shelves, called Trix.
- It was probably weird at first to see a fruity cereal,
but Trix was exciting because it was colorful,
it smelled like candy,
and it tasted like nothing else on the market.
- [Narrator] And unveils a new cartoon mascot
to rival Tony the Tiger, the Trix Rabbit.
- The first Trix Rabbit appeared on children's programming
like "Rocky and His Friends" and "Captain Kangaroo."
And he was always trying to steal cereal from kids.
- [Boy in commercial] Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids.
- Making it crystal clear
to all the millions of children watching
that this cereal was for them.
- The intense rivalry between Will Kellogg
and James Ford Bell
changes the cereal industry as we know it.
- A tectonic shift in cereal happened
throughout the 1950s,
when cereal went from a health product for adults
to new products aimed at kids.
- [Narrator] And Bell and Kellogg's impact
on the American breakfast landscape continues to this day.
- One thing a lot of people from other countries
often comment about the United States is the insane number
of breakfast cereals that are available.
That is in large part due to the competition
that existed between these big companies.
- There's something about cereal
that makes the kid in all of us kind of feel cozy,
and taken care of, and like things are simpler.
- [Narrator] Today, 95% of American children
start their day with a bowl of cereal.
- It's amazing how these cereals
that were invented 70, 80 years ago
are still the best sellers on the market today.
- [Narrator] And while Kellogg's Frosted Flakes
rakes in over $412 million a year,
it still ranks second behind General Mills' Cheerios.