Will Keith Kellogg was an American cereal manufacturer and philanthropist. As a young man, he assisted his brother, John Harvey Kellogg, in the operation of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Kellogg brothers devised a method for processing cooked grain into flakes. Their cereals became popular at the sanitarium and this invention inspired Will to produce and sell breakfast cereal.
Background
Will Keith Kellogg was born on April 7, 1860 at Battle Creek, Michigan, United States, the son of John Preston Kellogg, and his second wife, Ann Janette Stanley Kellogg; his older brother was John Harvey Kellogg. In 1834 J. P. Kellogg, a farmer, moved to Michigan Territory and purchased land near the village of Flint, where his first wife died. A few months later the widower married Ann Stanley, a young schoolteacher, whose force of character and managerial skills propelled the family upward toward a modest degree of prosperity. For brief periods the Kelloggs also lived in Tyrone Township, Livingston County, and in Jackson, where J. P. Kellogg became a broommaker. An earnest searcher for religious verities, J. P. Kellogg had embraced, around the middle of the century, the religious, dietary, and medical tenets of Seventh-day Adventism, and in 1856 the family made a final move to Battle Creek, site of the Adventist Tabernacle, Health Reform Institute, and publishing headquarters. Liking neither "Willie" nor "William, " Kellogg later had his name changed by court order to "Will Keith, " and usually referred to himself in later life as "W. K. "
Education
In a characteristically laconic "autobiography" that ran to sixteen sentences, Kellogg summarized his early years: "Less than high school education. Supported self after 14. Purchased from earnings most of clothing after 10. 1897 went to Texas for a year to get experience". In 1898 he took a course in bookkeeping, compressing the work of an academic year into three months. This marked the end of his formal education.
Career
In Texas, Kellogg, then nineteen years old and already a successful broom salesman, took over the management of a faltering Dallas broom factory in which Elder James White, an Adventist leader, was interested, and operated it on a profitable basis. He returned to Battle Creek at the end of the year with a distaste for selling brooms, a liking for horses, and $500 added to his net worth. In April 1880, he became an employee of the Adventists' Battle Creek Sanitarium, of which his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, was superintendent.
There followed twenty-five years of an uneasy and often stormy relationship between the siblings. During this time the expansive J. H. Kellogg exercised to the full the advantages inherent in being a public figure, an elder brother, and an employer, while the introverted Will Kellogg struggled to introduce order into his brother's complicated enterprises. These included two food companies, a monthly medical publication, and the operation of the sanitarium, where Kellogg performed the duties of business manager, but without the title. Since vegetarianism was central to Adventist doctrine, the two Kelloggs conducted extensive experiments in an effort to make nuts and grains a more appealing source of vegetable protein. "Sometime in the fall of 1895, " Will Kellogg said, in a deposition he made in 1903 in connection with some litigation involving J. H. Kellogg's Sanitas Nut Food Co. , "Dr. Kellogg asked me to assist him in conducting a series of experiments in which wheat was used. I prepared the wheat according to the suggestions he gave me, and assisted him after office hours". Out of this collaboration came wheat flakes, and by the turn of the century Battle Creek was enjoying a speculative boom as "The Health Food City, " with forty-two brands of wheat flakes alone being supplied to the national market. Because J. H. Kellogg was grudging about making capital investments in plant and machinery, because he was spread thinly over too many activities, and because he was above all a practicing physician and not a merchandiser, the Kelloggs lost the wheat-flake technology and market to more sophisticated industrialists, among them Charles William Post, who had already grasped the concept of selling "health foods" by the carload. But no one had foreseen this opportunity more clearly than Will Kellogg, who, chafing under his brother's quixotic attitude toward business, was determined that the Kellogg corn flakes, already perfected by 1902, would not escape from him as had wheat flakes, a coffee substitute, and other products developed for the sanitarium.
Despite their personal differences, the brothers remained in business association until 1905, when Charles D. Bolin, a St. Louis insurance man, visited the sanitarium as a patient, tasted the corn flakes, and sensed their commercial potential. Bolin urged Will Kellogg to start his own company and offered to help in financing it. After intricate negotiations, the brothers reached an agreement and a new corporation, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, to be managed solely by Will Kellogg, was established. Its cartons carried a bold legend in simulated script--"None Genuine Without This Signature--W. K. Kellogg. " At forty-six, an old man in his own estimation, the Kellogg whose name is now inseparable from corn flakes began his independent career. Heavy and ingenious advertising, reflecting a kind of inspired commercial evangelism--perhaps rooted in Kellogg's Seventh-day Adventist background--brought quick success. The company went on to develop a full line of breakfast foods and became the American breakfast cereal titan. In 1909 the Kellogg brothers were in an adversary position, both selling products under the Kellogg name, J. H. Kellogg having overcome his scruples in that regard. After a series of hard-fought legal battles, lasting until 1921, Will Kellogg won the right to use the family name. In a period notable for its application of the biological theory of the survival of the fittest to social institutions, he summed up his business philosophy succinctly: "We aim to be the fittest. "
Kellogg retired as his eightieth birthday approached. He had, to be sure, "retired" on numerous previous occasions, in a drama of renunciation that was played out in a series of repeat performances between 1924 and 1939, but in the latter year Watson H. Vanderploeg, a Chicago banker, became president of the company. Kellogg declined reelection to the board of directors in 1946. Kellogg made substantial gifts, mostly of a local or regional character, through the establishment in 1925 of the Fellowship Corporation. In 1930 he set up a permanent philanthropic structure, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, to apply existing knowledge to contemporary problems of people, rather than to support basic research. Kellogg contributed approximately $47 million to the foundation, including the residue of his estate. The foundation's programs in agriculture, education, and health extend over four continents; its assets currently stand at $443, 393, 347.
Nearsighted from boyhood, he contracted glaucoma and suffered a gradual loss of vision, becoming virtually blind after 1937 and totally so in his last years. He kept active by relying upon his prodigious memory, a faithful entourage, and his German shepherd dog. When he died, at the age of ninety-one, he was buried under a simple sundial on which a bronze robin tugged a bronze worm out of the bronze earth. One could scarcely think of a more apt metaphor for him--an early bird and a tenacious one.
Achievements
Will Keith Kellogg was well known as the founder the Kellogg Company which produced a wide variety of popular breakfast cereals. Under his leadership, the company became the world's largest manufacturer of ready-to-eat cereals (net sales in 1974 surpassed $1 billion). He also started the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. During its forty-four-year history, it distributed $293, 872, 375 and ranked seventh in size among American foundations.
Religion
Kellogg was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. His formal connection with the denomination ended in 1907, when he was expelled for worldliness and neglect of church affairs.
Views
Kellogg practiced vegetarianism as a dietary principle taught by his church.
Quotations:
“I feel kind of blue. Am afraid that I will always be a poor man the way things look now. ”
"Doing what's right today means no regrets tomorrow. "
“Dollars have never been known to produce character, and character will never be produced by money. I’ll invest my money in people. ”
“I am myself lamentably ignorant. The competition in the business world is such that the people with good educations are usually those who succeed. ”
Personality
Kellogg was of medium height, a round, neat, bow-tied, plain-looking man, completely bald in his later years. Shy yet arrogant, recessive yet confident, ruthless and generous, proud and humble, and highly competitive and intuitive in business situations, he remained an enigma to those who came in contact with him.
Interests
Kellogg did enjoy ocean travel and his interest in horses led to the establishment of the W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Ranch at Pomona, California, now the property of California State Polytechnic College.
Connections
Kellogg's personal life was less successful than his business career. On November 3, 1880 Kellogg married Ella Osborn Davis. They had five children. Ella died, a lonely woman, in 1912. In 1918 Kellogg married Dr. Carrie Staines, a physician at the sanitarium, but this marriage ended in estrangement. A son of his first marriage, John L. Kellogg, was brought into the Kellogg Co. to fulfill Kellogg's dynastic hopes, but was summarily dismissed. A grandson, John L. Kellogg, Jr. , was then groomed for the succession but this relationship, too, ended catastrophically in litigation over ownership of a process to turn corn grits into a puffed product similar to the well-known Rice Krispies.
