CREAM OF WHEAT

BRAND NAME COOKING WITH CREAM OF WHEAT

The official company website:  Cream of Wheat

HISTORY

The following is an excerpt from the book Ideas that Became Big Business by Clinton Woods. Published by Founders, Inc. Baltimore, MD, 1959, 414 pages.

Buy this book: Ideas That Became Big Business

The Cream of Wheat Story

Americans eat more cereal foods for breakfast than all the rest of the world. This is how one well-known breakfast food, devised in an effort to save a nearly bankrupt flour mill, grew into a great American business.

Like many other American institutions, "Cream of Wheat" started in a very small way but with a sound idea and the vision and determination to build a worthwhile business.

One almost-victim of the Panic of 1893 was a small flour mill in Grand Forks, North Dakota, owned and operated by a group of men headed by Emery Mapes, George Bull, and George Clifford. These men had fought to keep their milling business alive during the dark days of the Panic and had come through with only the bare bones of that business left. They had little operating capital remaining to keep them going. Even in those days flour milling was a tough, competitive operation for men with little capital.

About this time, it happened that Head Miller Tom Amidon was able to sell his partners on the idea of producing for profit a "breakfast porridge" which he had used at home and had found much to his family's liking. Amidon's "porridge" was that part of the wheat taken from the first break rolls of the flour mill. The partners agreed to let Amidon pack some of this cereal and ship it in a car of flour going to the firm's New York brokers, Lamont, Corliss & Company.

The funds of the milling company were now so low that Amidon had to cut the cardboard for the cartons by hand, label the packages himself, and crate them in wooden boxes made up from waste lumber. Mapes, who had once been a printer, found among his stock of old printing plates a suitable illustration to brighten up the package. It revealed the figure of a colored chef holding a saucepan over his shoulder and was the ancestor of the company's present-day widely-known trademark.

Next came the name for the product. Someone suggested the purely fanciful name, "Cream of Wheat"--a happy choice for appetite appeal. And so the labels for the newfangled breakfast food proudly bore the name "Cream of Wheat".

Within twelve hours after the arrival of the first shipment of "Cream of Wheat" in New York a telegram was received from Lamont, Corliss saying..."Never mind shipping us any more of your flour, but send a car of "Cream of Wheat."

"The best part of the whole wheat berry." That's what Tom Amidon, first factory superintendent, used to call the raw material from which "Cream of Wheat" is made. The endosperm of hard wheat of high protein content is the raw material used in the manufacture of "Cream of Wheat". This is the product of the first break rolls of the flour mill--the "top of the stream" which is the source of flour of the highest grade. Consequently, each flour mill supplying raw material can take off only a small portion of this stream for use in making "Cream of Wheat". Also, no one mill could supply enough of this material. The requirements for granulation and freedom from flour dust, bran particles, and other impurities are necessarily so strict that a blend of raw materials from many mills is essential to the manufacture of "Cream of Wheat".

In 1897 the demand for "Cream of Wheat" had completely outgrown the producing capacity of the small plant at Grand Forks and the business was moved to Minneapolis, then the best source of necessary raw material and a good shipping point with advantageous freight rates to other parts of the country. The original Minneapolis plant was soon outgrown, too, and in 1903 the company moved to its own new building at First Avenue North and Fifth Street, a familiar Minneapolis landmark which housed the "Cream of Wheat" plant until 1928.

Because the need for a larger and more modern building with up-to-date equipment and better transportation facilities, the present plant of The Cream of Wheat Corporation was built in 1927. This building is an ideal plant for cereal manufacture. The raw material is delivered in freight cars on one side of the building and is emptied into hoppers on the first floor. It is then elevated to the fifth floor from where it works its way down through the many stages of manufacture back to the first floor and is automatically delivered, properly packaged, into outgoing freight cars on the other side of the building.

In addition to the Minneapolis plant, the company has maintained a modern plant at Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, since 1915 to handle its rapidly growing Canadian business, including shipments to British Possessions outside Canada.

In 1929 the stock of the The Cream of Wheat Corporation was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and there are over 8,000 stockholders at the present time.

This, then, is the story of how a group of men in less than 50 years transformed an idea into a great American business. The present principals of the company, all descendants of the original founders, are determined that this business shall continue to grow, carrying on the traditions of honest value and quality manufacture which have made "Cream of Wheat" a household word among the American people."