Will Keith Kellogg

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Will Keith Kellogg, usually referred to as W. K. Kellogg (April 7, 1860 – October 6, 1951) was a U.S. industrialist in food manufacturing.

W.K. Kellogg started out selling brooms as a young businessman then moved to Battle Creek, Michigan to help his brother John Harvey Kellogg run the Battle Creek Sanitarium. There in one of the labs they produced the first flaked cereal. W.K. Kellogg saw this as a great business opportunity and wanted to keep the production of the product a secret, John Harvey disagreed and allowed anyone in the sanitarium to come see the flaking process. This allowed a fellow sanitarium guest, C. W. Post to see the process, thus inspiring him to start his own company, which became Post Cereals and later General Foods. C.W. Post then made his first million dollars off the sales of his new product; this upset W.K. Kellogg who then left the sanitarium to create his own company.

With his brother John Harvey Kellogg, he propagated eating cereals as healthy breakfast food, especially corn flakes. They started the Sanitas Food Company to produce their whole grain cereals around 1897. A standard breakfast then was eggs and meat eaten by the well off. The poor ate porridge, farina, gruel, and other boiled grains. John and Will eventually argued over the addition of sugar to the cereals. In 1906 he founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company which later became Kellogg Company. In 1930 Kellogg established the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. W.K. Kellogg saw the value of investing in a community. One of his more famous lines is "I will invest my money in people".

W.K. Kellogg was one of the first people to put nutrition labels on his foods. He also offered the first premium for kids to send in for.

During the depression, W.K. Kellogg extended his cereal plant to include 3 shifts, each lasting 6 hours. This gave more people in Battle Creek the opportunity to work during that time.

W. K. Kellogg is recognized as the founder of Kellogg College, Oxford.

Kellogg had a long interest in Arabian horses. In 1925, Kellogg purchased 377 acres for $250,000 in Pomona, California as the site of his Arabian Horse Ranch.In 1932, Kellogg donated the ranch, which had grown to 750 acres, to the University of California system. During World War II, the ranch was taken over by the U.S. War Department and was known as the Pomona Quartermaster Depot (Remount). In 1948 the ranch was transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and in 1949 it was deeded to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Later in 1949, title to the then 813-acre ranch and the horses was passed to the State of California with the provision that the herd of Arabian horses must be maintained. The ranch became part of the Voorhis unit of what was then known as the California State Polytechnic College in San Luis Obispo. This became known as the Kellogg campus, and in 1966, it separated to form California State Polytechnic College Pomona (now California State Polytechnic University, Pomona). ^[1] ^[2]

Some of Kellogg's property near Battle Creek, Michigan was donated to Michigan State College and is now the Kellogg Biological Station.