-A History of the Past
-Postum and Corn Flakes

from "Rust Out" by Dr. Royce Bailey, page 42

“One day there arrived at the Battle Creek Sanitarium a middle aged-man in a wheelchair, named Charles W. Post.  He was thinking primarily of a return to good health, but, as a born promoter with a constant eye out for something new, he couldn’t help wheeling his chair into the lab and talking with Dr. Kellogg’s assistants.

“One of the products Dr. Kellogg was cooking up at the time was something he called “Minute Brew,” a beverage made of toasted grains to take the place of coffee.  Post suggested to the doctor that they go in together on marketing it for the general public, but Dr. Kellogg rejected the offer.  Post, however, continued to go into the lab to watch the progress being made.  Dr. Kellogg’s younger brother, W. K., who was supervisor of the hospital, doing just about everything there was to be done for the princely sum of six dollars a week, came running to the doctor with the fear that Post might steal the formula and market the brew himself.  ‘Let him, by all means,’ the doctor laughed.  ‘Anything that will get people to drink less coffee is all right with me.’

“Post did indeed do exactly that; he brought out a coffee substitute called Postum.  Then he and his daughter Marjorie...performed some  Kellogg-like experiments in their own kitchen, and came up with a crunchy cereal not unlike granola, Dr. Kellogg’s first cereal food, which Post dubbed Grape Nuts.  Then came Post Toasties.  Post had marketed his first package of Postum in 1895.... His company was later merged with others and became the cornerstone of the great General Foods Corporation.

“The doctor’s brother...at the age of forty-six, worn to a frazzle by his brother’s ceaseless demands, believing himself to be an old man, pulled out of the sanitarium and with a businessman who had come to the San as a patient, started manufacturing Corn Flakes on his own.  At first it was a bitter struggle, not only to make the new, little company a success, but to keep his older brother from taking over... his Corn Flakes-’ The Original has this signature-W. K. Kellogg’.”

-Booten Herndon, “The Seventh Day”, McGraw-Hill, 1960, pp. 85-86.