The first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal was actually John Harvey Kellogg’s granola. But it was based on James Caleb Jackson’s earlier invention, in 1863, which he called granula. So, although Kellogg’s granola was not the first cereal made, or even the first cold cereal, it was probably the first that we would consider a modern cereal. Unlike Kellogg’s version, Caleb’s cereal needed to be soaked in water before it was eaten. It was fourteen years later when Kellogg unveiled his granola product at his Battle Creek Sanitorium. By 1881, his company, Kellogg’s Sanitas Food Company, was selling two tons of granola a week.
You know what granola is, and you probably are aware of what granola has come to represent. For instance, you know pretty much what is meant when a person is referred to as “granola.” The term encompasses health food, vegetarianism, natural living, the counterculture, environmentalism, and a sort of preoccupation with 1960’s values. But it’s really just a crunchy food made of grains.
Who Invented Granola?
The first granola was developed in 1863 by James Caleb Jackson. Jackson was a health reformer and he was the director of what we would call a health spa, but in those days was called a sanitorium. Before that, by the way, we was a hardcore Christian abolitionist.
He made a grain based food that he called granula, not granola. Jackson got the name from a Latin word for grain, granum. Now, you may have heard about the health claims associated with granola, but Jackson’s claims would just bowl you over: He said that his granula was a ‘pure’ food that would prepare you for the second coming. Not only that, but it would hasten the arrival of the second coming. Also, it would help make you calm, which seems convenient giving the implications. Also, it would give you better Christian values and even get you into progressive politics, while reducing carnal desire.
From Masonry to Breakfast
Jackson’s granula didn’t start as a “crunchy” snack; it began as a tooth-threatening commitment to pureness. His process was the antithesis of the modern “fast” breakfast. He took heavy Graham flour, baked it into dense sheets, broke those sheets into chunks, and baked them a second time. The resulting “cereal” was so hard it could break a tooth if eaten dry. To make it edible, patients at his sanatorium had to soak the “granula” in milk or water for several hours, usually overnight.
The Precision of the Factory: While Jackson was breaking his grain bricks by hand, Kellogg used the machinery of the Sanitas Food Company to grind the baked dough into uniform, sand-like granules. This subtle change in “particle size” was the key to his success; because the pieces were smaller and more precisely baked, they could be eaten with just a few minutes of soaking rather than an entire night. It was the birth of “convenience” health food, a concept that would have been an oxymoron to the original reformers.
The Commercial Irony: This is where the story gets interesting. Sylvester Graham, the spiritual father of this movement, hated the industrialization of food. Yet, to make his version of Jackson’s formula accessible to the masses, this rock-hard “reform food”, John Harvey Kellogg had to invent the Sanitas Food Company. He took Graham’s “anti-commercial” ideals and ran them through a factory, eventually winning the “Cereal Wars” by making the process faster and more convenient. Since granola was not good enough, he invented the first cereal flakes, which paved the way for the cereal industry we see today, the very definition of “big food.”
This shift from handmade ‘bricks’ to industrial ‘granules’ wasn’t just about efficiency; it was about a fundamental shift in how food was perceived. To understand why Jackson and Kellogg were so obsessed with the physical form of their cereal, we have to look at the strange pseudo-science that governed their world, a belief system that saw every grain of wheat as a moral biological agent.
🚀 The Next Cereal Revolution: Kellogg’s managed to solve the “soaking problem,” but this eventually led to the soggy problem. It would take another thirty years and a literal cereal cannon to invent the permanent crunch we know today. Read the Explosive History: The Physics of the Puff: How the Cereal Cannon Ignited a Breakfast Revolution
The “Medical Food” Fallacy: Like Causes Like
Jackson’s claims weren’t just religious “fluff”, they were based on a specific 19th-century belief in Moral Transference. He believed that the physical properties of a food would be literally transferred to the eater. A “pure” grain would “purify” the soul; a “calm” food would “calm” carnal desires.
This “Like Causes Like” logic is slightly different from the more famous “Like Cures Like” approach found in homeopathy or ancient medicine:
- Like Causes Like (The Moral Tonic): This was about “positive” transference. Jackson and Kellogg sold food as an “overall tonic” to instill virtues. It’s a marketing tactic that eventually led to the Cereal Wars, where breakfast was sold as a “medical” requirement for a productive life.
- Like Cures Like (The Clinical Remedy): This was about “negative” transference, using a specific ailment to cure itself. This is the foundational root of the Hair of the Dog myth. While Jackson wanted “pure” food to make “pure” people, ancient doctors believed the only cure for a rabid dog bite was the hair of that same dog.
Both of these paths eventually converged at the soda fountain. Early advertisements for Cocaine-infused Coca-Cola used this same “Medical Food” playbook, promising that their “brain tonic” could biologically—and morally, alter the consumer. Early cereal advertising borrowed heavily from Patent Medicine advertising, and Coca-Cola was the ultimate crossover patent-medicine. In essence, there is little difference between the early history of the Soda Industry and the Breakfast Cereal industry. Whether religious or pharmaceutical, the tactics were the same.
The Trademark Irony: From Granula to Granola
As John Harvey Kellogg moved to commercialize Jackson’s invention, he ran into a legal hurdle: Jackson already owned the name Granula. In a move that mirrored the creative naming trends of the time (where “ola” endings were becoming the “it” suffix for new products), Kellogg simply swapped the ‘u’ for an ‘o.’
However, the final irony of the Kellogg empire is that he eventually abandoned the very name he fought to create. As his Corn Flakes and Wheat Flakes began to dominate the American breakfast table, they overshadowed the humble granola. Kellogg’s “Big Food” success was so absolute that he didn’t bother to keep the Granola trademark current. This allowed the term to lapse into the public domain, transitioning from a proprietary medical product to a generic term for any crunchy grain mixture.
This trademark lapse is precisely why the word was available for the 1960s counterculture to reclaim. Because it was no longer a “Kellogg’s” product, it could become a symbol for “natural” living. Today, people use “granola” as a pejorative adjective to describe a person’s values, such as environmentalism, holistic health, and a rejection of the very industrial “Big Food” systems that Kellogg used to build his empire. Jackson, who wanted his cereal to prepare souls for the Second Coming, would likely be shocked to find his invention synonymous with the “free love” and self-exploration of the hippie era.
Further Reading
Chew Your Food 32 Times: Where Did This Advice Come From? It’s clear the fellow who invented this advice had never eaten Jackson’s granula! He’d have no teeth to chew with.