The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel

Author:Howard Markel [Markel, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307907271
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

The “Flavoring Department”: “Kellogg’s products win their favor through their flavor,” circa 1915 Credit 90

Will’s cereal company was his life’s work, his main source of joy, and his most reliable source of fulfillment and identity.74 For the remainder of his working life, it seems the company occupied his every waking moment, often at the exclusion of his roles as a father and husband. Still, one cannot help but admire his singular resolve to make Kellogg’s the best of its kind. In his own fashion, he loved, or at least cared deeply about, his factories, his employees, and those who sold his products extending from the men and women working for him in Battle Creek all the way to every grocer who carried them and, of course, every customer who enjoyed them.75

From his early days at the San to his retirement at Kellogg’s, Will recognized the importance of human resources to help him achieve his goals. Like many of his cadre of successful industrialists, he was less than enthusiastic about the labor union movement. Corporate paternalism aside, he paid good wages to his factory workers, his executives, and his support staff but he demanded honesty, integrity, hard work, and accountability. He made certain his factories were clean and provided safe working conditions. He built and maintained adequate restrooms and pleasant dining rooms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner breaks. He also instituted a kindergarten, nursery, and day care center for the children of working mothers (free of charge), full medical, dental, and nutritional “attention” to employees and their families, and a ten-acre, well-coiffed garden surrounding the plant for the enjoyment and recreation of the workers. Most important, he listened to his employees’ gripes and if he agreed that a problem existed, he fixed it.

Even during the most ominous fiscal threats, such as those set in motion by the long Great Depression, Will remained confident and in charge. Instead of trimming his payroll with layoffs, on December 1, 1930, Will took the novel, and humane, tack of instituting four 6-hour shifts for his factories, rather than three 8-hour shifts, so that his entire work force of more than 1,500 men and women remained employed and able to provide for their families. Will kept this workforce in place because he knew everyone had to eat breakfast. What better and more economical way to do that, he asked, than with a 15 cent box of his nutritious, filling, tasty cereal? And the only way to feed the nation its daily breakfast was to keep manufacturing boxes of Corn Flakes. An impressed President Herbert Hoover, who was contending with a rapidly rising national unemployment rate, invited Will and grandson John Jr. to visit his fishing camp near Winchester, Virginia, for the weekend to discuss the six-hour-shift plan.76 Will Kellogg’s steely resolve, buttressed by his undying faith in his greatest creation—those crispy, toasted, golden Corn Flakes—enabled him to shepherd his company to a gross profit of $6 million (about $110 million today) in 1933, the nadir of

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