Post breakfast cereal

It was Charles William Post, the founder of Post Cereals who first clearly comprehend that convenience and flavor were more forceful and more widely appreciated advantages than were the healthfulness and vegetable origin previously relied upon as selling points by producers of foods especially breakfast cereals.

After a number of experiments, a product name Postum was successfully created by CW Post in 1895. Postum is a cereal beverage coffee substitute based on similar to the one served in Kellogg’s sanitarium. The company name Postum Cereal Co. Ltd was established in the same year, which later incorporated in 1922 as General Foods Corporation.

Postum Ltd. achieved wide-scale distribution of its products through massive spending on advertising in newspapers and magazines. In 1897 Post began to manufacture Grape Nuts, a cereal based on another Kellogg product.

By late 1905, the corn flake business was booming and other cereal manufacturers had gotten into this line. In January 1906, Post Cereals introduced a new version of the corn flakes. Post extensive and perceptive advertising campaigns brought him rapid success in the food industry.
Post breakfast cereal

Early history of breakfast cereal

The word “cereal” comes from the name Ceres, the ancient Roman goddess of the harvest. Cereals have been people’s basic food since Neolithic times, following the birth of agriculture, which initially focused on the cultivation of wild grains.

Around 7000 B.C the first cereals (wheat & barley) are cultivated in the Middle East.

Breakfast cereal, a food made from grain, commonly eaten in the morning. The oldest type of cereal, known as porridge or gruel, requires cooking in water or milk. Eating breakfast began in the Neolithic (late Stone Age) era, when large stones were used to grind grains to make a sort of porridge. Porridge was also a staple of Roman Soldiers’ diets – they called it pulmentus.

They are called processed foods because they go through several processes to turn them into breakfast cereal.

During the middle ages, barley and hops were used to make beer which was served up in the morning to hungry peasants alongside oatcakes or porridge.

A porridge called samp had been eaten by New England colonists since shortly after they arrived in America. It was described by Native American language scholar Roger Williams as ‘the Indian corne, beaten and boiled and eaten hot or cold with milk or butter, which are mercies beyond the Native plaine water and which is a dish exceedingly wholesome for the English bodies’.

During the American Civil War, Union soldiers were glad to get a hot breakfast cereal, especially when they were in the march or cut off from supply trains.

Cooks used foodstuff on hand to make, panada, a hot breakfast gruel affectionately known as ‘bully soup,’ which the main ingredients were watery corn meal and crumbled hardtack, both of which were standard issue.

Another cornmeal porridge can be made by boiling stale cornbread. Cush-cush is a Louisiana dish that was standard camp fare for Confederate soldiers during civil war.

The original motivation for the development of precooked breakfast foods seems to have been the desire of some vegetarian to add more variety to their diets.

Health food movement emerged in the nineteenth century United States, in a particular among followers of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church which emphasized a vegetarian lifestyle.

At that time most Americans did not consume enough dietary fiber and many suffered from digestive disorders as a result.
Early history of breakfast cereal

Extrusion of breakfast cereal

Extrusion is defined as a process in which material is pushed through an orifice or a die of given shape. The pushing force is applied using a piston or a screw. Extrusion-technology is gaining increasing popularity in the global agro-food processing industry, particularly in the food and feed sectors. Extrusion cooking technologies are used for cereal and protein processing in food.

Extruded breakfast cereal is one of ready-to-eat extruded products and ideal food for people’s modern-day lifestyle, where speed and convenience, as well as complete nutritional values, are desirable food characteristics.

Historically, one can trace the use of a screw as a conveying device to the Greek philosopher Archimedes, who used a single screw in a cylindrical open channel to pump water uphill.

The first food extruder was designed to manufacture sausages in 1870s. Breakfast cereal have been produced via extrusion since 1930s when it was used to process making ready-to-eat (RTE) cereals to shape hot, precooked dough.

In this application, the level of shear rate was low. Extrusion technology has replaced the conventional method of boiling and then drying the products and is a popular technique to make ready to eat products.

During the late 1930s and 1940s, directly expanded corn curls were made using extruders, which were characterized by extremely high shear rates. The first patent on an application of twin-screw extrusion technology was filed in the mid-1950s.

The extrusion cooking, especially used in the production of precooked and modified starches, ready to eat cereals, and snack foods has increased recently.

Extrusion of breakfast cereal

Invention of corn flakes by John Harvey Kellogg

John Harvey Kellogg was born on February 26, 1852 in Tyrone, Michigan to his parents John Preston and Ann Janette Stanley Kellogg.

He graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1875. In the 1890s, Dr John Harvey was the head of a medical department. He was also head of the nutrition department and since he was a vegetarian, he fed everyone stuff made from grains and vegetables. In 1894 Dr John Harvey Kellogg and his younger brother, Will Kellogg invented a new way of processing corn: they steamed and softened the kernels, added flavorings and then flattened it by feeding it through two steel rollers.

The resulting flakes were then bale in an oven. This process created a cereal they called toasted corn flakes, which the Kellogg brothers served at their sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan.

On May 31, 1894 John Harvey filed for a patent on “flaked cereal and process of preparing same.” The patent covered flakes prepare from barley, oats and other grains as well as those made from wheat. On March 7, 1897, Dr John Harvey dished up the first serving of corn flakes at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
Invention of corn flakes by John Harvey Kellogg