Will Keith (not William) Kellogg did no such thing.
In 19th century America there was a movement towards a healthier alternative to meat to be served as breakfast. An early exponent was Dr. Sylvester Graham, who advocated the use of coarsely ground wheat flour and inspired the invention of a cracker made from it – giving his name to both the flour and the cracker.
In 1854, Ferdinand Shumacher began grinding oats by hand in the back room of his store in Akron, Ohio. Sales were brisk, and profits were strong. It was Schumacher that introduced the Quaker symbol, in 1877, and his company was one of the four that merged in 1901 to form Quaker Oats.
The first breakfast cereal that was intended to be eaten cold was Granula. It was invented in 1863 by Dr. James Caleb Jackson, who ran the Dansville Sanitorium in Dansville, New York. It was made from bran nuggets, which had to be soaked overnight to make them palatable, and this – along with its lack of flavour – limited its popularity.
The next major player in the breakfast cereals market was Shredded Wheat, which was invented in 1890 by Henry Perky of Denver, Colorado. He began selling it to vegetarian restaurants in 1892, and he also leased machines to manufacture the product.
The user of one of Perky's machines was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who had been the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan (the headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventist Church) since 1876. He had created a biscuit of oats, wheat, and corn, which he called Granula. In 1881 he was sued by James Jackson and forced to change its name to Granola.
Kellogg's Sanitarium Food Company was still marketing Granola in 1893. The Kellogg Company today dates its history to 1898, when "in a fortunately failed attempt at making granola, our company's founder, W. K. Kellogg, and his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, changed breakfast forever when they accidentally flaked wheat berry." It was actually in 1894 that the Kellogg brothers forgot about a pot of wheat, left it overnight, and the next morning rolled it out anyway. Instead of cohering into a biscuit, the wheat berries emerged as hundreds of flakes. This is how corn flakes were invented. The brothers founded the Sanitas Food Company in 1900 to market their new breakfast cereal, but then they argued over the recipe (Will wanted to add sugar). So, in 1906, Will started his own company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which became the Kellogg Company in 1925 after it began making cereals other than corn flakes.
An American product known as Force (wheat flakes) became available in the UK in 1902 – its branding featuring the original Sunny Jim. Kellogg's opened its first factory outside the USA in Canada in 1914, and began exporting corn flakes to the UK in the early 1920s.
Kellogg's revived the Granola brand in the 1960s, apparently to exploit the Hippie culture which sought more natural foodstuffs than those that had been available previously.
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