1. Made How
2. Volume 3
3. Cereal

Cereal

Background

Breakfast cereal is a processed food manufactured from grain and intended to be eaten as a main course served with milk during the morning meal. Some breakfast cereals require brief cooking, but these hot cereals are less popular than cold, ready-to-eat cereals.

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Prehistoric peoples ground whole grains and cooked them with water to form gruels and porridges similar to today's hot cereals. Cold cereals did not develop until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals were invented because of religious beliefs. The first step in this direction was taken by the American clergyman Sylvester Graham, who advocated a vegetarian diet. He used unsifted, coarsely ground flour to invent the Graham cracker in . Influenced by Graham, Seventh-Day Adventists, who also believed in vegetarianism, founded the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the s. At this institute, later known as the Battle Creek Sanitarium, physician John Harvey Kellogg invented several grain-based meat substitutes.

In or , Kellogg invented a food he called granola from wheat, oats, and corn that had been mixed, baked, and coarsely ground. In , Kellogg and his brother W. K. Kellogg invented the first precooked flaked cereal. They cooked ground wheat into a dough, then flattened it between metal rollers and scraped it off with a knife. The resulting flakes were then cooked again and allowed to stand for several hours. This product was sold by mail order as Granose for 15 cents per 10-ounce (284 g) package.

Both W. K. Kellogg and C. W. Post, a patient at the sanitarium, founded businesses to sell such products as health foods. Their success led dozens of imitators to open factories in Battle Creek between and . These businesses quickly failed, while Kellogg and Post still survive as thriving manufacturers of breakfast cereals.

Their success can be partially attributed to advertising campaigns, which transformed the image of their products from health foods to quick, convenient, and tasty breakfast foods. Another factor was the fact that Kellogg and Post both manufactured corn flakes, which turned out to be much more popular than wheat flakes. Breakfast cereals have continued to increase in popularity in the twentieth century. Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals are served in nine out of 10 American households.

Raw Materials

The most important raw material in any breakfast cereal is grain. The grains most commonly used are corn, wheat, oats, rice, and barley. Some hot cereals, such as plain oatmeal, and a few cold cereals, such as plain shredded wheat, contain no other ingredients. Most breakfast cereals contain other ingredients, such as salt, yeast, sweeteners, flavoring agents, coloring agents, vitamins, minerals, and preservatives.

The sweeteners used in breakfast cereals include malt (obtained from barley), white sugar, brown sugar, and corn syrup. Some natural cereals are sweetened with concentrated fruit juice. A wide variety of flavors may be added to breakfast cereals, including chocolate, cinnamon and other spices, and fruit flavors. Other ingredients added to

improve flavor include nuts, dried fruit, and marshmallows.

Vitamins and minerals are often added to breakfast cereals to replace those lost during cooking. The most important of these is vitamin B-i, 90 % of which is destroyed by heat. The antioxidants BHA and BHT are the preservatives most often added to breakfast cereals to prevent them from becoming stale and rancid.

The Manufacturing
Process

Preparing the grain

• 1 Grain is received at the cereal factory, inspected, and cleaned. It may be used in the form of whole grains or it may require further processing. Often the whole grain is crushed between large metal rollers to remove the outer layer of bran. It may then be ground more finely into flour.
• 2 Whole grains or partial grains (such as corn grits) are mixed with flavoring agents, vitamins, minerals, sweeteners, salt, and water in a large rotating pressure cooker. The time, temperature, and speed of rotation vary with the type of grain being cooked.

• 3 The cooked grain is moved to a conveyor belt, which passes through a drying oven. Enough of the water remains in the cooked grain to result in a soft, solid mass which can be shaped as needed.

• 4 If flour is used instead of grains, it is cooked in a cooking extruder. This device consists of a long screw within a heated housing. The motion of the screw mixes the flour with water, flavorings, salt, sweeteners, vitamins, minerals, and sometimes food coloring. The screw moves this mixture through the extruder, cooking it as it moves along. At the end of the extruder, the cooked dough emerges as a ribbon. A rotating knife cuts the ribbon into pellets. These pellets are then processed in much the same way as cooked grains.

Making flaked cereals

• 5 The cooked grains are allowed to cool for several hours, stabilizing the moisture content of each grain. This process is known as tempering. The tempered grains are flattened between large metal rollers under tons of pressure. The resulting flakes are conveyed to ovens where they are tossed in a blast of very hot air to remove remaining moisture and to toast them to a desirable color and flavor. Instead of cooked grains, flakes may also be made from extruded pellets in a similar manner.

Making puffed cereals

• 6 Cereals may be puffed in ovens or in so-called "guns." Oven-puffed cereals are usually made from rice. The rice is cooked, cooled, and dried. It is then rolled between metal rollers like flaked cereals, but it is only partially flattened. This process is known as bumping. The bumped rice is dried again and placed in a very hot oven which causes it to swell.
• 7 Gun-puffed cereals may be made from rice or wheat. The rice grains require no pretreatment, but the wheat grains must be treated to partially remove the outer layer of bran. This may be done by abrading it off between grindstones, a process known as pearling. It may also be done by soaking the wheat grains in salt water. The salt water toughens the bran, which allows it to break off in large pieces during puffing. The grain is placed in the gun, a small vessel which can hold very hot steam and very high pressure. The gun is opened quickly to reduce the pressure suddenly, which puffs the grain. Extruded pellets can also be used to make gun-puffed cereals in the same way as grains.

Making shredded cereals

• 8 Shredded cereals are usually made from wheat. The wheat is cooked in boiling water to allow moisture to fully penetrate the grain. The cooked grain is cooled and allowed to temper. It is then rolled between two metal rollers. One roller is smooth and the other is grooved. A metal comb is positioned against the grooved roll with a tooth inside each groove. The cooked grain is shredded by the teeth of the comb and drops off the rollers in a continuous ribbon. A conveyor belt catches the ribbons from several pairs of rollers and piles them up in layers. The layers of shredded wheat are cut to the proper size, then baked to the desired color and dryness. Shredded cereals may also be made in a similar way from extruded pellets.

Making other cereals

• 9 Cereals can be made in a wide variety of special shapes (circles, letters of the alphabet, etc.) with a cooking extruder. A die is added to the end of the extruder which forms a ribbon of cooked dough with the desired cross-section shape. A rotating knife cuts the ribbon into small pieces with the proper shape. These shaped pieces of dough are processed in a manner similar to puffing. Instead of completely puffing, however, the pieces expand only partially in order to maintain the special shape.
• 10 Granolas and similar products are made by mixing grain (usually oats) and other ingredients (nuts, fruits, flavors, etc.) and cooking them on a conveyor belt which moves through an oven. The cooked mixture is then crumbled to the desired size. Hot cereals are made by processing the grain as necessary (rolling or cutting oats, cracking wheat, or milling corn into grits) and partly cooking it so the consumer can cook it quickly in hot water. Salt, sweeteners, flavors, and other ingredients may or may not be added to the partly cooked mixture.

Adding coatings

• 11 After shaping, the cereal may be coated with vitamins, minerals, sweeteners, flavors such as fruit juices, food colors, or preservatives. Frosting is applied by spraying a thick, hot syrup of sugar on the cereal in a rotating drum. As it cools the syrup dries into a white layer of frosting.

Packaging

• 12 Some cereals, such as shredded wheat, are fairly resistant to damage from moisture. They may be placed directly into cardboard boxes or in cardboard boxes lined with plastic. Most cereals must be packaged in airtight, waterproof plastic bags within cardboard boxes to protect them from spoiling.
• 13 An automated machine packages the cereal at a rate of about 40 boxes per minute. The box is assembled from a flat sheet of cardboard, which has been previously printed with the desired pattern for the outside of the box. The bottom and sides of the box are sealed with a strong glue. The bag is formed from moisture-proof plastic and inserted into the box. The cereal fills the bag and the bag is tightly sealed by heat. The top of the box is sealed with a weak glue which allows the consumer to open it easily. The completed boxes of cereal are packed into cartons which usually hold 12, 24, or 36 boxes and shipped to the retailer.

Quality Control

Every step in the manufacturing of breakfast cereal is carefully monitored for quality. Since cereal is a food intended for human consumption, sanitation is essential. The machines used are made from stainless steel, which can be thoroughly cleaned and sterilized with hot steam. Grain is inspected for any foreign matter when it arrives at the factory, when it is cooked, and when it is shaped.

To ensure proper cooking and shaping, the temperature and moisture content of the cereal is constantly monitored. The content of vitamins and minerals is measured to ensure accurate nutrition information. Filled packages are weighed to ensure that the contents of each box is consistent.

In order to label boxes with an accurate shelf life, the quality of stored cereal is tested over time. In order to be able to monitor freshness over a reasonable period of time, the cereals are subjected to higher than normal temperatures and humidities in order to speed up the spoiling process.

The Future

Breakfast cereal technology has advanced greatly since its origins in the late nineteenth century. The latest innovation in the industry is the twin-screw cooking extruder. The two rotating screws scrape each other clean as they rotate. This allows the dough to move more smoothly than in an extruder with only one screw. By using a twin-screw extruder, along with computers to precisely control temperature and pressure, cereals that usually require about 24 hours to make may be made in as little as 20 minutes.

Where to Learn More

Books

Bruce, Scott, and Bill Crawford. Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal. Faber and Faber, .

Fast, Robert B., and Elwood F. Caldwell, eds. Breakfast Cereals and How They Are Made. American Association of Cereal Chemists, .

Periodicals

Dworetzky, Tom. "The Churn of the Screw." Discover, May , pp. 28-29.

Fast, R. B. "Breakfast Cereals: Processed Grains for Human Consumption." Cereal Foods World, March , pp. 241-244.

Other

Kellogg Company."How Kellogg's® Cereal is Made." December 4, . http://kelloggs.com/booth/cereal.html (July 9, ).

— Rose Secrest

We have all enjoyed breakfast cereal, most of us since childhood, but how many times have we considered where the delicious substance we’re enjoying with milk comes from? For most of us, the answer to that question means the aisle in the supermarket where we are overwhelmed with choices from Kellogg’s, Post, Nestlé and others.

But when we stop to think about it, that delicious concoction we’re shoveling in with a spoon had quite an amazing historic journey on the way to our bowls. It was complete with a national health crisis, cartoon characters, a couple of wars and a host of innovation.

A Brief History of Cereal and Advertising

Every good invention starts out as a concept, and believe it or not, the original idea behind breakfast cereal was to use it as a cure for an epidemic of indigestion. Following the American Civil War, many people suffered from indigestion due to high protein diets.

This is also the time when medical professionals first began to recognize and acknowledge the growing need for lifestyle changes, including healthier eating and exercise. Institutions known as sanitariums began to sprout up across the country and encouraged this kind of living. Sanitariums were an extremely popular and trendy place to detoxify from the world, and some of their devotees included U.S. presidents and national heroes like Amelia Earhart and Thomas Edison.  

At these sanitariums, healthy diets and, surprisingly, vegetarian diets, were promoted as being integral to your health and welfare. Sanitarium dieticians began to experiment with ways to make what would eventually become our modern-day breakfast cereal.

These early concoctions often involved a decidedly unappetizing (to our modern, sugary cereal-loving selves) blend of flours and water that was baked and soaked in milk overnight – a process that probably sounds familiar to the large numbers of people returning to old-school breakfast cereals like muesli (basically a combination of rolled oats, mixed with fruits and nuts, then soaked overnight in milk). Europeans originally made muesli using orange juice instead of milk.

When, toward the end of the s, a sanitarium in New York started losing business, the owners hired what would become a familiar name in breakfast cereal to do their marketing:  John Harvey Kellogg.

This is the time in breakfast cereal history where advertising and the idea of “ready to eat” intersect, and these huge concepts built an entire breakfast cereal industry. After all, while soaking the cereals overnight in milk might have been considered healthy, and served readily at the sanitariums, they certainly weren’t convenient for the average household to serve daily.

John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will would eventually formulate a very recognizable breakfast item – the cereal flake. The cereal flake they created out of corn turned out to be much more popular than the wheat flake produced at the time by competitors, and the product brought them much success. This is particularly impressive when you consider the cereal they created is still immensely popular a hundred years later.

Eventually, John’s brother Will Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, changing its name to Kellogg in .

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Will Kellogg and his company created many breakfast items, including variations of modern-day cereals like granolas and other now-common cereals like puffed rice. The name “granola” was coined by Kellogg to avoid a lawsuit over a similarly named cereal produced by a competing company.

Breakfast Cereal Gets Sweet

In the late s, the first sweetened cereal was placed on the market. Marketed specifically at children, it became a huge success. This was the first major break from what had been considered a health food.

With this new market segment of children came the need to develop new marketing techniques to appeal to youngsters. Thus began the use of cartoon characters as shills for these new sugary breakfast treat.

Eventually, especially after the advent of TV in the late s, breakfast cereal became inextricably tied to cartoons. Many argue that breakfast cereal would not have become a staple of the American breakfast table without the help of cartoon characters over the decades.

It wasn’t just kids who enjoyed this type of cereal, and it would soon become a normal occurrence for breakfast cereals to be sweetened. Other additives would soon be included in the recipes at the factories. During World War II, advertisers hyped vitamin additives to help fuel the American public during meat and other shortages during the war effort.

Around this time too, Kellogg and others began experimenting with chemical additives to increase the shelf life of cereals. This ushered in a whole new line of flavors and colors to appeal to the taste habits of the baby boomer generation and beyond.

Where Does Cereal Come From?

We’ve looked at how cereal came to your breakfast table historically, but now let’s look at modern-day breakfast cereal. Where does this product originate? What goes into the process of manufacturing the end product?

The basic ingredient of most breakfast cereals starts off as a cereal grain such as wheat, corn, oat or rice. Grains are hardy plants that can be grown in most parts of the world.

Rice has specific growing needs, and a lot of rice planting is done under water, making it more geographically specific. More than 90 percent of the world’s rice comes from Asian countries such as China, Bangladesh, and India.

Wheat can grow anywhere from the Artic regions to below the equator. The Southern and Midwestern parts of the United States grow a lot of grain. A significant portion of the world’s corn supply comes from the American heartland.

The harvest method depends on the type of grain involved, but includes the removal of the whole grain from the remainder of the plant. Once this is accomplished, the growers prepare the grain for storage and/or shipment, depending on how long a journey it’s going to take from the fields to the manufacturing plant and ultimately to the store shelves and your breakfast table.

How Is Cereal Manufactured?

Cereal manufacturing is a blend of cooking, mechanical know-how and industrial technology.

At the manufacturing plant, the grains undergo a process of inspection and cleaning before being subjected to a host of treatments that take the grain from its raw state to the form we find in our cereal bowls. These processes can include things like grinding, toasting, puffing, the introduction of vitamins and minerals and the addition of colors and flavors, just to name a few. The actual process will vary depending on the type of cereal, such as a flaked, puffed or some other form.

In some instances, the grain may be crushed between gigantic metal rollers to remove the outer layer. The grain may then be further ground into flour, or left in a whole or partial state, depending on the intended use.  

The grains left whole or partial will be cooked in a massive pressure cooker, which rotates them as they are heated. If the grains have been converted into flour, they will be cooked in an extruder, which rotates the flour with a large, heated metal screw which blends and heats the mixture at the same time.

The cereal company introduces additives at this point in the cooking process, which can include flavorings, vitamins and minerals, spices, sweeteners and water. After the grains are cooked, they are moved through a drying oven which removes enough water to render the mixture into a shapeable dough. If a flour mixture has been used, it will be expelled from the extruder in ribbon form, which is then cut into pieces.

After the grains have been cooked, the production process depends on the type of cereal being made.

If the cereal being made is set into flakes, the cooked grains will be squeezed in between large metal rollers under a massive amount of pressure. The flakes that result from this process are transferred to ovens where they undergo blasts of superheated air to remove remaining moisture to give the product a pleasant toasted color and taste.

Puffed cereals can be made in a couple of different ways. One method used to make puffed rice only involves cooking, cooling and drying the grain before flattening it to a partial degree, then placing it in a high-temperature oven, causing the grain to puff up.

Another puffing method can be utilized with either wheat or rice. When wheat is going to be puffed, the outer layer must be removed, which can be done by soaking or using grindstones. The “gun” used to puff the cereal holds steam under extremely high pressure. The grain is loaded into the device, which is opened rapidly, thereby causing a steep drop in pressure, which puffs the grain.

The process of making shredded wheat starts off with boiling the grain, which is allowed to cool before being rolled out like the other cereals. However, in this case, one of the rollers has a metal comb, and as the grain is pushed through, it is shredded by the comb.

As you are aware from the plethora of choices at the supermarket, cereals can come in a wide variety of shapes. The process of making specially shaped cereals is similar to the process of making puffed cereal. The cooked grains are processed through an extruder, which has a specially shaped die at the end. As the material comes out, it is pushed through the die, giving it its shape, and a rotating blade cuts the shapes into pieces.  

After the cereal is formed into the various shapes, it receives a coating of sweeteners, colorings, frostings, syrups and preservatives.

After the cereal is processed, it is off to be packaged.  

Packaging Breakfast Cereal

Packaging materials, including the glue for cereal, should provide protection from humidity, spoilage, spillage, insect infestation and external odor, as well as be economical and easy to handle. Some breakfast cereals are packed directly in cardboard boxes, while others are packed in plastic bags inside the cardboard boxes. Some cereals, such as shredded wheat, are more resistant to damage from moisture, while others, specifically baby cereal, must be sealed in waterproof bags to protect them from humidity and keep them from spoiling.

Automated machinery can box breakfast cereal at rapid speeds of almost 50 each minute. The cereal box is created from a sheet of cardboard that’s been preprinted with the product’s imagery. The bottom and sides of the cereal package are sealed with an FDA approved hot melt adhesive. The hotmelt adhesives are thermoplastic polymer systems which are applied in a molten state.

The waterproof bag is inserted into the box, and then the cereal is loaded into the bag, which is heat sealed. The final step in the packaging process is the sealing of the top of the cereal box, which is done with a packaging hot melt adhesive that isn’t as strong as that used on the seams of the box, allowing it to be opened easily. Any adhesive used in food packaging must be FDA approved because it is considered an indirect food additive. Adhesives used in packaging must be separated from the food source, and for cereal it cannot exceed the limits of Good Manufacturing Practices.  

After that is completed, the boxes are packed and shipped to retailers, where they eventually land in the breakfast cereal aisle, and ultimately in your cereal bowl.

Final Thoughts

Although we think of breakfast cereal as a sugary treat that takes us back to our childhood, cereal was originally the product of a national health craze. This fad was sparked by an epidemic of indigestion that was brought on by a diet that focused too much on meat consumption following the civil war. Cereal only became more popular as time went on thanks to periods such as World War II, in which people had to search for alternative foods for vitamins and minerals.

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