Today’s show is focused on fun facts about cereal. Growing up, cereal was a huge treat. My parents wanted us to have a balanced breakfast and they were also budget conscious. As a result, we had an endless supply of porridge and oatmeal. I hated both. I would often just eat leftovers from dinner the night before.  During the summer, I would long for the sugary colorful cereal I’d see advertised during cartoons. I remember going to my grandma’s house growing up. She always had a selection of cereals. It was an amazing moment in time. I could enjoy as much Apple Jacks as I could stomach. Grandma also had a special drawer in her basement that had happy meal toys and cereal box toys that had accumulated over the years. She really knew the way to my heart with McDonald’s and cereal!  There were rare moments when visiting Grandma over the summer. If I was super lucky, I’d get to open a fresh box of cereal from the store. That meant the prize was still inside. Finally I was able to experience what the kids in the cereal ads got to experience. Amazing sugary cereal AND a fun prize. Could childhood get any better?  If you haven’t put two and two together yet, today is all about cereal. So grab a favorite box, your spoon and some milk and let’s dig in! Brief History of Cereal As always, we have to go back in time and start at the beginning to really understand where we are today. Breakfast cereal as we know it today got its start in the mid 1800s. James Caleb Jackson ran a medical sanitarium in western New York. He was religiously conservative and was also a vegetarian. He created a breakfast cereal from a whole wheat dough. Once the dough dried, they broke it into pieces. These chunks of cereal were so hard that they had to be soaked in milk overnight. He called it granula.  John Harvey Kellogg iterated on this idea. Kellogg was a physician in a health spa in Michigan. He made his own version of the cereal and called it granola. One of Kellogg’s former patients, C.W. Post took this same idea and created grape nuts.  John Kellogg and his brother Will, continued to work on cereal. Instead of dense chunks of wheat cereal, they developed a way to make a flaked cereal. They called this creation, “Corn Flakes.” C.W. Post didn’t want to be outdone by the Kellogg brothers. He decided to develop his own cereal. This was the first major competition to corn flakes. I seriously laughed out loud when I saw the name of their corn flake competitor. Kelloggs stuck with something original and descriptive, Corn Flakes.” Post decided to name their product Elijah’s Manna. Obviously these cereal companies had strong religious roots, but this pushed things too far. A number of religious groups got very loud about Post’s choice of names for their product. Post caved to the pressure and eventually renamed the product, “Post Toasties.” Much better! Toys in Cereal Let’s talk about prizes and cereal for a minute. Kellogg’s was the first cereal brand to include a prize with the purchase of cereal. In 1909 customers were given The Funny Jungle Moving Pictures Book when they bought 2 boxes of corn flakes. This promotion was a huge success. By 1912, Kellogg’s distributed 2.5 million copies of the Jungleland books. It didn’t take long for all of the other cereal producers to follow Kellogg’s example. Over the years, cereal producers had promotions that highlighted Star Trek, the Beatles, Ghostbusters, GI Joe and more. They offered candy, iron on patches, small toys and offers for shirts. One of the more bizarre offers I saw was a 1974 offer on Cherrios boxes.