W. K. Kellogg
Spent decades as his brother's overworked, underpaid assistant before building his own cereal company
Will Keith Kellogg was born in 1860 in Battle Creek, Michigan, to a family of modest means, and left school young to help support the household, working for years as a travelling broom salesman before joining the sanitarium run by his older brother, the physician John Harvey Kellogg. For decades he worked as his brother's business manager and general assistant, doing exhausting, poorly paid administrative work while his brother received most of the recognition for the sanitarium's ideas.
The brothers experimented together with grain-based foods for the sanitarium's patients, and in 1894 accidentally discovered a process for making flaked cereal when a batch of cooked wheat was left to sit too long before being rolled. Will Kellogg saw commercial potential in the flakes that his brother, focused on medical uses, did not share, and the two men disagreed for years over how far to commercialise the product and whether sugar should be added to make it more appealing to ordinary consumers rather than only sanitarium patients.
In 1906, in his mid-forties, Kellogg finally broke away to found his own company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, adding sugar and investing heavily in advertising, decisions his brother strongly opposed and that led to a bitter, lasting rift and years of legal disputes over use of the family name.
The company, later renamed Kellogg's, grew into one of the world's largest food companies, and Kellogg remained in Battle Creek for the rest of his life, using much of his fortune to found the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which continued to fund child welfare and agricultural programmes long after his death in 1951.