Sometime in the early 1890’s, at a Nebraska hotel, Henry Perky — who suffered from heartburn— had encountered a man similarly afflicted, who was eating boiled wheat with cream.
The idea had cooked for a while in Perky’s mind, and in 1892 he had taken his idea of a product made of boiled wheat to Watertown, NY, where his friend William H. Ford, a machinist by trade, helped Perky build the device that he had conceived.
Henry Perky introduced his newly-built machine for making shredded wheat at the 1893 World’s Fair; the shredded wheat was described as “Tasting like a shredded door mat”. Perky had developed a process for making these things, and in 1895, Mr. Perky and William Ford were issued utility patents for their “Machine for the Preparation of Cereals for Food” (U.S. Patent No. 502,378, August 1, 1893), the first of dozens of patents that Perky would eventually receive in connection with the production of shredded wheat.
Perky’s business plan was to sell the machines and not the cereal. But the biscuits proved more popular than the machines.
In 1895 in Denver, Perky founded the Cereal Machine Company. He began distributing the shredded-wheat biscuits from a horse-drawn wagon in an attempt to popularize the idea. But the biscuits proved more popular than the machines themselves. So, Perky moved East and opened his first bakery in Boston, Massachusetts, and then in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1895. He retained the name of The Cereal Machine Company, and adding the name of the Shredded Wheat Company.
Perky was a pioneer of the “cookless breakfast food”, and it was he who first mass-produced and nationally distributed ready-to-eat cereal. By 1898, Shredded Wheat was being sold all over North and South America and Europe.
By 1901, he had set up an ultra-modern plant at Niagara Falls to make shredded wheat, and the falls became the familiar logo of the cereal, which continues as a Nabisco product. Edward A. Deeds, an electrical engineer became a director of the National Food Company, the new name Perky had adopted for his enterprises that produced Shredded Wheat and related products, such as Triscuits crackers.
In 1908, the company again took the name of The Shredded Wheat Company, and another factory was built in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
History of shredded wheat
The history of food processing centers on the transformation of raw ingredients into food or various food forms. This tradition can be traced back to ancient times, specifically the prehistoric era, where early processing techniques like roasting, smoking, steaming, fermenting, sun drying, and preserving with salt were utilized. Without a doubt, food processing stands as one of humanity's oldest practices, dating back to time immemorial.
Pages
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Popular Posts
-
The first working combine was the invention of Hiram Moore and John Hascall of Kalamazoo County. Michigan, who tested it in the late 1830s. ...
-
The history of modern ice cream production machines is a fascinating journey of innovation and technological advancement. Early methods of m...
-
The frozen food market is one of the largest and most dynamic sectors of the food industry. Freezing is one of the oldest and most commonly ...
-
The use of jacketed steam in food processing has roots in the early advancements of the Industrial Revolution, when steam power revolutioniz...
-
When World War I ended in 1918, many soldiers returned home to the United States— bringing their hunger for donuts. Adolph Levitt, an immigr...