Company History

Kellogg Company was founded with an entrepreneurial spirit, and W.K. Kellogg’s legacy of innovation continues to be an instrumental part of the company today.

We began as a small manufacturer and marketer of better-for-you breakfast food, and while we have grown, we have never really lost that initial focus. In fact, throughout our history, the company has retained many of the values instilled by Mr. Kellogg in those early years.

We celebrated our company’s 100th anniversary in 2006. It was gratifying to reflect on our successes, but we also recognize our opportunities for the future. We know our businesses well and are committed to them. We believe that it is this focus and commitment that will drive sustainable, consistent and dependable rates of growth in the years to come.

With the discovery of toasted wheat flakes, the process for developing what would become Kellogg’s Corn Flakes* was put into place. In the late 1800s at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, a combination hospital and health spa for the elite and famous, W.K. Kellogg, business manager, and his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, chief physician, were in the process of cooking some wheat for a type of granola when they were called away. When they returned, the wheat had become stale. They decided to force the tempered grain through the rollers anyway, and, surprisingly, the grain did not come out in long sheets of dough. Instead each wheat berry was flattened and came out as a thin flake. W.K. Kellogg continued with his own experiments, developing the process for flaking corn in 1898. This led to the formation of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in 1906, which eventually became Kellogg Company – changing the form of breakfast forever and setting into motion a century of innovation for Kellogg.

Company founder Will Keith (W.K.) Kellogg was an early believer in the potential of international growth and began establishing Kellogg’s as a global brand with expansion and the introduction of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes* into Canada in 1914. The Kellogg Canada manufacturing plant in London, Ontario, began as the Canada Corn Company, a manufacturing facility with the rights to produce Toasted Corn Flakes for Canadian distribution. In 1924, W.K. Kellogg bought the plant and took over production to supply all of Canada with Kellogg cereal. As success followed and demand grew, Kellogg Company continued to build manufacturing facilities around the world, including Sydney, Australia (1924); Manchester, England (1938); Queretaro, Mexico (1951); Takasaki, Japan (1963); Bombay, India (1994); and Toluca; Mexico (2004).

People make all the difference, and Kellogg employees around the world really are our single most important competitive advantage. Our goal is to provide an environment in which each of our employees can succeed. This requires constant diligence and the evolution of our developmental process. As Mr. Kellogg recognized more than a century ago, the success of our company is dependent on the success of our employees.