Today, we are all familiar with puffed corn cereals. These types of breakfast cereals are little balls or pillows of puffed-up, sugary corn dough that hold up well in milk. Now, we don’t have to wolf down our cereal before it becomes a big pile of milky mush. You have General Mills and Kix cereal to thank for that. General Mills did not invent the concept of puffed cereal, but they did invent the first one that really kept its crunch!
Kix Cereal, introduced by General Mills in 1937, has the distinction of being the first corn cereal to be produced by the extrusion process. Pulverized corn and other ingredients were formed into a dough and forced through an extruder die to produce the desired shape. This is the same process that was later used for Cheerios and is responsible for many of today’s common cereals, including Trix, Cocoa Puffs, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, and any other cereal that is similar to these.
Image by Mike Mozart via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Before puffed cereals, all cereals were either flakes or nuggets. However, Kix was not the first puffed cereal made. Quaker Oats introduced Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat cereals in the early 1900s. These cereals have their own whacky history (“Food Shot From Guns”). If you’ve never eaten Quaker Puffed Wheat, you may have eaten Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, now called Honey Smacks. If so, you know they get darn soggy, darn fast! While puffed rice cereals, as exemplified by Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, fare a bit better, they too, turn to mush in the bowl if not eaten quickly enough.
General Mills adopted the same puffing technology that Quaker had used after its patent ran out in 1929. Instead of puffing grains, they puffed balls of corn dough. Before this, the familiar round puffed shape we know today had never been experienced in a breakfast cereal. Besides producing the round shape, it resulted in a cereal that held up in milk much better than its predecessors. Even when it absorbed moisture, it didn’t turn straight to mush and was still pleasant to eat.
The First Puffed Cereals
This first technology was different than the extrusion processes used today. Quaker used a process invented by Alexander P. Anderson. A biologist and physiologist, he was interested in starch grains, particularly cereal grains like rice, wheat, corn, barley, and oats. He thought that since starch granules are usually so packed together, if they could be broken up they would be easier to digest and assimilate by the human digestive system.
In the early 1900s, while curator of the Herbarium at Columbia University, Anderson theorized that a tiny speck of water existed inside the nucleus of a starch crystal.  The newly established New York Botanical Garden, at this time, had an interest in changing and improving people’s eating habits and health. When Anderson was allowed to use their laboratories, during the winter of 1901 to 1902, he tested his theory about the hygroscopic nature of starch. It is claimed that he first experimented with glass tubes, but any mention of this is left out of his own telling of the story.
Anderson, through his experimentation, had expected to produce something like popcorn. But when expanded, he was amazed to find that the grains, although they were expanded to eight times their original size, retained their original shape. The “coats” of the grain, were unbroken but the starch was completely broken up. His experiments, according to him had produced the most digestible cereal ever invented, it was “crisp and enticing” and millions of people would delight in it. Although he could have, in no way, proven these assertions, he was right about the millions of people.
He realized that any vessel that could be sealed and then opened could produce puffed rice, so procured investors to allow him to try to turn this puffing process into a functioning product. He sealed a long gas pipe at both ends, but on one end he left the pipe head loose so that it could be quickly removed. He placed rice inside the tube and heated the tube while rotating it. He used a gauge to predict when the rice was under enough pressure inside the tube, then, he used a sledgehammer to quickly knock off the loose pipe head on one end. The result was a load of puffed rice exploding from one end of the pipe, like a “Puffed Rice Cannon.” These experiments did not always go according to plan. In one of his attempts, the pipe exploded.
Food Shot From Guns
According to Anderson, any cereal grain could be puffed or expanded using his method. He noted that “the products obtained are pleasant to the taste and the process may be varied to produce a great variety of flavors with any given cereal.” He also said that the food produced by this method is “absolutely sterilized and may be preserved or stored for long periods.” He was correct on all points. 1
Anderson’s backers sold their interest in his invention to Quaker Oats company, who gave Anderson a laboratory but pretty much ignored him. In 1904, Anderson demonstrated his puffing gun at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. Quaker’s involvement in this show, or lack thereof, is unclear.
This time, he used much larger cylinders that resembled small cannons. It is claimed that Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell witnessed him shooting amazingly large amounts of puffed rice out of his cannon into a large cage that was two stories high and forty feet wide. By the end of his show, Anderson had puffed more than 20,000 pounds of rice that was bagged and sold to delighted onlookers.
After Anderson obtained patents on his process, a subsidiary of Quaker Oats called American Cereal produced Puffed Rice breakfast cereal but Quaker Oats later took over production. The company, now teamed up with Anderson, then introduced a Puffed Wheat Cereal. Anderson, once ignored, became the face of the new cereal line, which Quaker called “Prof. Anderson’s Gift.” Advertisements proclaimed the cereal to be “The Eighth Wonder of the World.”
At first, sales of the new puffed cereals were less than spectacular. Then Claude Hopkins, a renowned advertising man, came up with the slogan “The Food Shot from Guns.” After this, sales took off. 2
The patents lapsed in 1929 allowing General Mills to experiment with their own puffed cereal, resulting in the first puffed corn cereal, Kix. Other cereals quickly followed like Cherioats (now Cheerios), Corn Pops, and Lucky Charms. What these cereals have in common is that they did not rely on whole puffed grains but instead used extruded doughs, a huge improvement in the puffed cereal market.
The puffing gun technology was replaced in the 1940s for more efficient extrusion machines, but any cereal that is not a flake or a nugget (like Grape Nuts) used the same basic extrusion technology that was first invented in 1902 by Anderson. 3 Today, many flaked cereals use an extrusion process.
- Dunkak, Harry M.. Knowledge, Truth, and Service: The New York Botanical Garden, 1891-1980. United States, University Press of America, 2007.
- The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Dolan, Kathryn Cornell. Breakfast Cereal: A Global History. United Kingdom, Reaktion Books, 2023.