- [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.
- [Narrator] It's a $35 billion industry
that almost single handedly created breakfast
because less than 150 years ago,
cereal and breakfast as we know it didn't exist.
- Breakfast was leftover version of the night before.
You couldn't say, "Oh,
that's what people eat for breakfast."
- [Narrator] Until a happy accident changed everything.
Thanks to a series of visionaries,
over the next few decades,
cereal evolved from a health supplement for adults
to a breakfast staple, starting with corn.
- Well, that's a first.
- [Narrator] Then wheat.
- Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions.
- [Narrator] Rice.
- Do you hear that?
It's crackling.
- [Announcer 1] Snap, crackle, pop.
- [Narrator] Innovative new shapes.
- [Announcer 2] Cereal, the cereal
that's shaped like a letter O.
- [Narrator] Flavors.
- Trix smelled like candy
and it tasted like nothing else on the market.
- [Narrator] And world-famous mascots.
- Sugar Frosted Flakes are great.
- [Narrator] Becoming some of the biggest brand names
in American history
and creating a beloved new food category.
- Yaba-daba-doo.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] The origins of breakfast cereal begin in 1876.
- Make sure a copy is sent to Dr. Beaumont.
- [Narrator] With a young doctor
who runs a local wellness institute.
His name is John Kellogg
and he's the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
- People came from all around the world
to the Battle Creek Sanitarium,
Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford.
- [Howard] They came to Battle Creek to get well,
- but they also came to see Dr. John Harvey Kellogg,
who was one of the most famous physicians of his day.
- [Narrator] Dr. Kellogg is working
on a totally new medicine
that he believes will prevent nervous disorders,
tooth decay, even cancer.
- The chief complaint of people coming to the sanitarium
was some type of stomach or gastrointestinal problem.
- And so, he had this notion that eating meat
was dangerous to your health
and that a grain and vegetable diet was far better.
- [Narrator] Served as medicinal food,
the product is made of flour,
oatmeal and cornmeal baked into brittle cakes,
then smashed into granules.
[mallet thumping] [granules clinking]
It's unlike anything most Americans have ever seen.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] He calls it "granola."
- [Libby] John Harvey Kellogg believed
that food and medicine were tightly bound
and the right diet was going to be the right answer.
John Harvey said, "No sugar in that granola.
It has to be really healthy."
And he really believed in these whole grains.
They would make you sleep better,
they would make you feel better.
- [Narrator] Kellogg serves his patients granola
shortly after they wake up each day.
But at the time, a dedicated morning meal
is practically unheard of.
- Breakfast wasn't a particularly identifiable meal
in those days.
It didn't have foods all that much associated with it.
Often, it was leftovers from the night before.
You couldn't say, "Oh,
that's what people eat for breakfast."
- It was a major effort and took a ton of time.
It became a huge undertaking.
- [Jon] But the simple meal of breakfast cereal was something
that could be served hot or cold,
and would take a very short amount of time to consume.
[mallet thumping] [gentle music]
- That one's a little overcooked,
but we'll still use it.
- [Narrator] John's right hand man.
- Which one is this from?
- [Narrator] Is a former employee at a broom factory.
It's his younger brother, William.
- [Harvey] It was Will Kellogg
who recognized there are a lot more healthy people
who want a nutritious, easy-to-prepare breakfast
than ill people who need an easy-to-digest breakfast.
Doctors did not advertise.
That was against medical ethics at the time.
- [Narrator] A happy accident will soon change everything
for the Kellogg Brothers and for breakfast.
- [John] Good morning.
- Did you mean to leave that out last night?
- Shoot. [footsteps thumping]
Help me roll this out.
- [Narrator] To try and salvage a batch
of dough left out overnight,
Will decides to roll it out anyway.
The result is a flake.
- Huh, well, that's a first.
- This creation was an accident, an accident.
- [Adam] You stop and you think,
what if they ust disposed of it?
What if they didn't force their way through the crank?
And the thing that I think is so fantastic
is you never know
where that moment of inspiration's gonna strike.
- [Harvey] Flake cereal was very popular.
It was remarkably welcomed by people
who ate at the sanitarium.
It was a eureka-like moment.
- [Narrator] To produce flakes, dough is boiled,
left out to ferment for several hours
and then compressed through rollers into thin sheets.
Those sheets are baked
and naturally flake off when scraped.
Will calls them Corn Flakes.
[suspenseful music]
- [Harvey] He was ready to get out,
so he raised money and took out loans,
and Will Kellogg was off to the races
and he never looked back.
- [Narrator] In 1906, Will Kellogg
releases Kellogg's Corn Flakes
and pours all his money into advertising.
- Will Kellogg, he had all sorts of amazing campaigns.
He had these giant billboards,
the largest billboard of his time
that he put up in Times Square, similar things in Chicago.
He had a whole campaign where they suggested to women
that they wink at the grocer
and that'd be a sign to give them the Kellogg Corn Flakes.
So there was also sexual innuendo.
He promoted the hell out of Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
- [Narrator] By 1909, Kellogg's is producing 120,000 cases
of Corn Flakes per day, saturating the American market.
- The introduction of Corn Flakes by the Kellogg brothers
really revolutionized breakfast
by making it accessible to everybody.
In many cases, it was women who woke up early,
spent hours and hour and hours
before the family arose preparing breakfast,
and it enabled them to spend fewer hours in the kitchen
and people to start the day
with a more nutritious beginning.
- [Zlati] It's something that sort of paved the way
for other convenience foods, if you will,
and just the way we start our day now
with that convenient food, we see that idea of time saving
yet nutritious food in every meal of the day now.
- [Narrator] But so successful are Kellogg's Corn Flakes,
that new competitors will soon be inspired
to enter the cereal arena.
[suspenseful music continues]
In 1921, an unexpected challenger does just that.
James Ford Bell is an eager rising executive
at the Washburn-Crosby Flour Mill.
- [Adam] 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.
- [Joanna] But with the rise of electricity making it possible
to open mills anywhere in the country,
new competitors start springing up.
- [Sarah] 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 flaked cereal,
much like Kellogg's,
but it's not made from corn, it's made from wheat.
- [Adam] 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 that's made out of wheat
and it has a little bit of a different flavor.
- And what did you say that you call these?
- Wheat Flakes.
- [Narrator] James Ford Bell's Wheat Flakes
will one day spearhead the formation of a company
now valued at nearly $27 billion.
But first, the battle for cereal supremacy
will inspire one innovation after the next.
- You might wanna stand back.
- [Narrator] Until cereal dominates mornings
for Americans of all ages.
- Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] It's 1921,
and Washburn-Crosby Flour Mill executive James Ford Bell
believes he may have discovered his company's future
in a wheat flake.
- 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.
- [Narrator] After months of trial and error,
Bell's team presents 36 different recipes.
[suspenseful music]
[flake crunching] - 14, this one, this is it.
- [Joshua] Bill 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] 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 cornflakes.
[cereal crunching]
- 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.
- [Sarah] 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.
- How about this one, Nutties?
- What, no?
Come on, Nutties is confusing.
- What is it?
- You're not gonna like it. - [James] Why not?
- Because I like it, which means you won't.
[dramatic 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.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] With the Wheaties rebrand, sales skyrocket.
To keep up with the resulting wheat demand,
James Ford Bell leads the formation
of wheat conglomerate General Mills,
but Kellogg's is still number one
and they won't go down without a fight.
- [Sarah] 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 have 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.
[rice crackling]
- [Narrator] And the result is something unheard of.
- Do you hear that?
It's crackling. [suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] It's the late 1920s,
and Kellogg's has just developed a new rice-based cereal
that talks.
- 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, hmm?
We have a cereal that talks.
- [Brooke] 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
to 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.
- [Announcer 1] Snap, crackle, 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.
- From some cartoonist named Vernon Grant,
submitted them on spec.
[paper rustling]
- Ask him what he wants for these and pay it.
- [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 this 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.
- 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.
[suspenseful 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.
- The first ever athletes 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 want to grow up big and strong
and a great baseball player like Lou Gehrig,
you got to eat Wheaties."
- [Narrator] The Breakfast of Champions campaign
sparks a surge in sales and creates a lasting brand legacy.
- You know you've 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.
I don't think that's happening.
- [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 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.
- [Yohuru] 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 thumping]
- The market research you asked for.
- [Adam] 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, ah, 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.
- [Jason] 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.
- [Ali] 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.
- [Jason] 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.
[suspenseful 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.
[suspenseful music continues] [cereal exploding]
- So they take cornmeal
and they essentially fire it out of a cannon.
- Oh. [footsteps crunching]
- [Jason] So 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.
- A 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,
you introduced 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.
[suspenseful music]
- [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.
- [Adam] 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 thumping]
- 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
in 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 best-selling cereal brand
in America.
- Cheeri Oats.
- [Narrator] On May 1st, 1941,
General Mills' Cheeri Oats debuts
as the first ready-to-eat puffed oat cereal.
- Cheeri Oats has a musical sound to it.
- [Nilou] General Mills decided to name the cereal Cheeri Oats.
Cheeri Oats, it's both food and fun.
- [Narrator] In its first year alone,
Cheeri Oats 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 Cheeri Oats
further weakens Kellogg's grip on the cereal market.
But victory is short-lived.
[suspenseful music]
[paper rustling]
- What is this?
- It's a cease and desist.
We're being sued by Quaker Oats.
[suspenseful music continues]
- [Narrator] It's 1945,
and General Mills has just been served a cease-and-desist
over the name of their new cereal, Cheeri Oats.
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.
- [Brooke] Quaker had to be jealous of General Mills.
They've released a successful cereal using oats,
which is Quaker's bread and butter.
- [Narrator] General Mills Chairman James Ford Bell
is forced to make the difficult decision
to rename the brand.
[suspenseful music]
- So instead of trying to fight it,
General Mills decides to just drop the oat part of it.
♪ Cheerios
- [Announcer 4] Yes, Cheerios,
the cereal that shaped like a little letter O.
- They have a little disclaimer in the box that just said,
"Formerly known as Cheeri Oats."
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.
- [Romi] Will Kellogg was the king of cereal
and to lose that title must have been infuriating.
- [Narrator] Despite the setback,
Will Kellogg is determined
to regain his hold on the cereal marketplace.
He sees a path to redemption
that will forever change the face of cereal.
- It's called the baby boom.
- [Yohuru] After the war,
there are record four 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.
- [Jason] Kellogg's Corn Flakes
was one of the most popular cereals
in America, had been for decades.
And in introducing a sugared version of that,
it's a potentially risky move
in 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] In 1952, Kellogg's Sugarcoated Cereal
hits the market with the word "sugar" directly in the name.
- Sugar Frosted Flakes, there is nothing subtle about it.
- [Narrator] To target kids, Kellogg's ad agency
creates a cartoon character
to appear in America's hottest new medium, television.
- Sugar Frosted Flakes are great.
- [Narrator] His name is Tony the Tiger.
- [Sarah] 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 Corn Flakes.
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.
- 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] Over the next decade,
sugary cereals become a breakfast mainstay,
with Kellogg's responding to General Mills' Trix
with their own fruit-flavored cereal.
- They weren't different flavors,
but they were different colors, very cool, very exciting,
unlike anything that Kellogg's had ever had before.
- Froot Loops.
- [Narrator] Froot Loops will one day sell more
than 90 million boxes a year, but before it does,
a longtime Kellogg's rival will take a bold new step
in the evolution of cereal,
making a run at sugary cereal dominance.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] In 1964 in Tarrytown, New York,
Post Food technician Stan Reesman
is looking for a new competitive product.
Post has been in the cereal business as long as Kellogg's
when their founder C.W. Post
was inspired by the granola made
in Kellogg's sanitarium back in the 1890s.
- You're a good worker, Mr. Post.
- Thank you, Will.
[suspenseful music]
- For C.W. Post to see what the Kellogg brothers are up to,
then take it back when he leaves and form his own cereal,
I mean, some would call it thievery,
others would call it smart American ingenuity and business.
- [Narrator] Sales of Post's cereal Grape-Nuts
have remained steady over the years,
but now in the 1960s, they're looking for something new.
- [Jason] So Stan Reesman is trying to figure out
what else can we do to stick it to Kellogg's?
I think it was Einstein who said, you know,
"Inspiration is everywhere."
So Reesman, he's looking at their Post Rice Krinkles cereal
and thinking, what can we do
with these products we already have?
And they're looking at Froot Loops, right,
a Kellogg's product, and it's like, hmm, interesting.
[suspenseful music]
- [Jason] He's like, wait a second,
we could take this hit product
and our currently not-a-hit product
and they seem like they're a match made in heaven.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] Within weeks, Stan Reesman
has transformed Post's Rice Krinkles
into a colorful, fruit-flavored cereal.
- He created this thing that feels brand new,
even though it's sort of just from the ingredients
that he already had sitting around.
[cereal crunching]
- What do we call them?
- What do they look like?
- Chips.
- Pebbles.
[suspenseful music]
- [Taster] Pebbles.
- [Narrator] They named the small, colorful rice flakes
Fruity Pebbles.
- Nice job, Stan. [Stan chuckling]
- I think we got it. - [Taster] Nice job.
- [Narrator] After months in development,
Post is nearly ready
to unleash their brand new Fruity Pebbles cereal.
And like all other kids cereals, they need a mascot.
- It's always vital to have an exciting, lively mascot
you want to interact with kids and have this image.
- [Adam] But the market is really getting jammed.
Mascots are everywhere.
Dig'em the frog, the Trix Rabbit, Tony the Tiger.
So they had to figure out a way to stand out
from other similar products in the marketplace.
- [Narrator] While LaMothe at Kellogg's
is the king of original mascots,
Post wants to up the ante and do something bigger.
- Any mascot that already has some familiarity
with the general public,
people are just going to gravitate to that
before a brand new character.
- [Jason] So they tie it together
with one of the biggest sitcom hits
that happened to be animated in the '60s.
- Yaba-daba-doo!
- Yaba-daba-do not count out Post.
- Spokesman were big back then,
they would've celebrities being spoke,
but they said, "Okay, we're gonna get Fred Flintstone,
put him on the cereal."
And boy, they made magic.
- Fred the Flintstones' new Fruity Pebbles.
- [Narrator] Inspired by the character
of Pebbles Flintstone, Fruity Pebbles
is the first Posts cereal to join forces
with a television series.
- Most companies that are beginning with a mascot
have to have some kind of origin story.
They've gotta invest children emotionally.
Kids know Fred Flintstone.
- [Yohuru] So we've got somebody who's easily recognizable,
slap him on the box and voila, built-in target audience.
- As a kid looking at the Flintstones,
you're obsessed with the world they live in, right?
Fruity Pebbles does look like a cereal
that you could have found in Bedrock.
- [Narrator] in October of 1971,
this novel partnership gives both the new cereal
and the syndicated cartoon a big boost in popularity.
- By the time they're coming up with this,
The Flintstones is almost off the air,
but after this partnership, it's in syndication nonstop.
So Fruity Pebbles is a hit out of the gate.
That's a big one.
I'm sure Kellogg's is like, whoa, you know,
that one, we didn't expect that coming from these guys.
It was a big shot.
- [Narrator] With Fruity Pebbles
becoming the favorite debut cereal of 1971,
Post launches a chocolatey spinoff, Cocoa Pebbles.
- [Children] Yeah. - To Cocoa Pebbles.
- [Narrator] And that's a hit too.
- Chocolatey good.
- Cocoa Pebbles give you chocolate milk in the end.
You gotta love that.
- [Narrator] To this day, despite other innovations
and reinventions of breakfast, cereal still reigns supreme.
- Kellogg's not only became the first word and first name
in terms of the American breakfast table,
they redefined breakfast in America
and maybe the world as we know it.
- For a long time, breakfast was frankly very boring.
And then suddenly,
there was this sort of explosion of joy in the morning,
this idea that you could have fun
with something that came out of a box.
- 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.
- It's amazing how these cereals that were invented 70,
80 years ago are still the best sellers on the market today.
[suspenseful music]
- There's still something magical though
about like the ice cold milk, of the crunch of cereal.
How could you not love this?
I just want to salute every teacher
that had to contend with a room full of kids
that just consumed bowls of cereal like this.
This had to be rocket fuel in the system of a first grader.