Flour Power | Full Documentary

[Music] foreign people have been mealing wheat in roughly the same way for a millennium but in the late 19th century this crucial food making process was about to change dramatically at the Falls of Saint Anthony on the Mississippi River the specific type of flower created in Minneapolis is really the first industrial carbohydrate in world history convergence of ideas enterprising individuals Innovation and natural resources changed milling and forged a new Global food industry good nourishing wheat is the most popular cereal grain in all America and full of food energy this industry changed how we eat it altered the economic and literal landscape of the Upper Midwest it would spur a spectrum of businesses it would make household names out of its founding families and that made our area the breadbasket of the world as these meals turned they drove change and growth that would Ripple across the region the nation and the globe and this is how it begins [Music] the story of Milling begins largely in small local Mills as you have white Cellars moving in to the eastern and Southeastern portions of Minnesota Milling is part of everyday life whether you're talking about Lumber Mills or flower mills and small localized meal production is a signature feature of white settler colonialism one thing they had a problem with was finding cash crops you needed food for your own sustenance but you also wanted to find something you could sell and wheat was the obvious answer the wheat that was first planted here is called turkey red it's a beautiful wheat it grows really tall it's a burnished red it's what inspired the phrase Amber ways of grain bread making was hugely important to 19th century early and mid 19th century kitchens bread is the only food that's eaten three meals a day seven days a week the southeast quadrant of Minnesota began what became known as the king wheat era that really flourished from 1860 and through the 1870s and 80s a vivid account from a visitor to Hastings Minnesota in the late 1850s described the key crop of the new state there was wheat everywhere wheat on the Levee wagon loads of wheat pouring down to the lid weep in the streets wheat in the sidewalks warehouses of wheat men talking of wheat wheat was the one idea of Hastings Day Afternoon we arrived there Minnesota was called by one observer in 1874 as one huge Wheat Field if you were a shopkeeper a milliner whatever you did if you wanted to make some extra money you learned how to grade and buy Grain from the farmers and that turned a man like Theodore Sheldon a lot of people in all the Sheldon Memorial Auditorium in Red Wing he was just a Mercantile regular businessman and he started investing in Grain which led to the necessity for Banking and this has happened in the other River Cities too a name that would be familiar the world over is Cargill William Wallace Cargill started a grain Warehouse business that took advantage of the growth of trade in Southeastern Minnesota Cargill and PV were very big line operators and went all the way west with the grain and of course the railroads themselves were quite the money maker along the way but it was mainly shipping storing and then selling the grain that where the real money was and that's where those families those companies did very well I call it a grain Rush it's not quite as dramatic or interesting I guess is a gold rush but in many ways that grain turned to Gold Millstone spun this gold grinding wheat into flour in centuries past Mills were turned by people livestock and wind in Minnesota waterways provided a picturesque engine wherever there was a flowing water you could Dam it up build a small Mill and you'd be in business Goodhue County in 1873 was called the banner wheat County of America it also had a Milling industry that was Second To None they were all around I believe there were 27 flower mills and Grist Mills in Goodhue County [Music] and Winona Hastings and red wing in those three communities in particular were becoming wheat ports there were no railroads until the 18 early 1870s so farmers said to bring their product to Market and it was to the River Cities where it could be shipped those cities really grew on wheat money it is true that wheat built the River Cities of the Mississippi River Valley a south of St Paul it was more Milling certainly in that area before Minneapolis was even formulated the small village of Minneapolis may have been playing catch-up to the river towns to the South but the would-be city and the more established Saint Anthony across the river had what in business terms would be called an unfair advantage Minneapolis has a monopoly if you will a monopoly on power the amount of energy produced by the falling water in Saint Anthony is immense it's immense [Music] as early as the 1830s and 40s you see a number of new englanders arrive and they see the potential water power at the Falls of Saint Anthony and and they Envision a great City a great industrial city on the banks of the Mississippi River at The Falls and where some see nothing but natural beauty or the kind of awe and spectacle of nature they see dollar signs they see that that is power to be harnessed into milling and at first it's mostly Timber that will slowly be shifting in the late 1860s and early 1870s as small flower mills become larger and larger among those who got into the business of Sawmills and water power was a Civil War General named catwallader C Washburn CAD wallet or Washburn he was the middle son of 10 children grew up in Livermore Maine he was a store clerk he was a school teacher he became a surveyor he then became a land Speculator he's a congressman from Wisconsin a dedicated abolitionist by the end of the Civil War he holds the rank of Major General he is a lumberman in Wisconsin he has a lumber mill in Lacrosse he takes a Riverboat up the river and he rides over to see Saint Anthony Falls which he had heard about and it is said when he first saw the Falls he gasped because he saw not just a waterfall he saw a source of energy meal Powers the term used to describe the control over water power were in the hands of the Minneapolis Mill company Washburn now joined by his brother William worked his way into control of the business and control of the awesome power of the falls and the river in 1866 at the end of the Civil War he builds not just a flower Bill he builds the largest in the region and it's so large that it's called washburn's folly because it is thought that no one could ever sell as much flour as washburn's new meal will make so suddenly washburn's Folly which it was thought maybe a failure is actually very successful and he's operating at a capacity within a year while Washburn was consolidating his power on the West Bank of the Mississippi another New Englander arrived to begin what would be a decades-long competition in 1872 Charles Pillsbury joined his family and business on the East Bank of the river Charles Pillsbury is a railroad clerk he has had a business in a produce Distribution Company Charles billsberry decides to buy into the Milling business and he buys a failing flower Mill within a year he's turned it around and is now generating a profit from those Origins becomes eventually the Pillsbury company the Pillsbury family quickly starts to kind of elbow out various competitors and that elbowing out is not just through kind of shrewd business work or very sharp business Minds is actually because of the access to investors Washburn Crosby Enterprise like Pillsbury they are expanding into both National and then International markets the two actually compete against each other for the next 120 years and these two companies were number one and number two flower companies in America Washburn was always looking for an edge and embraced innovators John Crosby joins Washburn along the way and he was a very good Miller Crosby actually ran the business and probably should be given more credit for its success another of washburn's effective executives was Millwright George Christian who hired French Millers to bring experimental European techniques to the meals as you Mill wheat it has very hard brand it cracks and some of that brand would get into the flower that had a lot of middlings in it which is a byproduct of Milling they're hard kernels and there would have been maybe some chaff in there it would have been inconsistent Minneapolis Millers need the latest and greatest technology to fully separate The Germ and the Brain from the endosperm in the kernel that is really at the core of what they're trying to do if you can do that in an efficient way at a large scale in these factories that are going up on the banks of the Mississippi you are going to beat your competitors [Music] working in secret they adapted a European system into what would be known as the middling purifier this system sifted out the heavier parts of the wheat allowing for a more pure white flour with the Advent of this industrial Mill that CAD wallet or Washburn built he began sifting out the middlings and creating a wider lighter flower white flower had the bran and The Germ almost completely removed that was very difficult to do until the 1870s or 1880s Turkey Red wheat has a really nice gluten level and gluten is the muscle in bread so it's very easy to work with it makes a great bread I mean it was really pure white flour that's what people wanted there's a real discourse around Purity in the 1880s and 1890s in the United States we can talk about racial Purity and social and cultural relationships we can talk about purity in the food supply the purity of their products seems self-evident simply because it is so white the ways in which the bran and The Germ were removed from it were actually crucial if you're going to allow flour to be shipped to all these different parts of the world in other words to create a shelf-stable flower product you had to remove the brand and The Germ because those were the things that made flour go bad and that's why so much flour making had been localized for centuries now there was some dispute at that time Ram who is the father of the graham cracker said you were putting asunder what God put together and you're damaging wheat we need that whole grain to have a healthy product so there was some debate about whether or not that kind of sifting made for a better flower made for whiter flower we know that and it made for a flower that was much easier for housewives to use with more and more updates and Innovations to his meals washburn's profits went from 50 cents a barrel in 1871 to 4.50 in 1874. the Milling industry spawned Associated businesses including Barrel making advertising and even makers of artificial limbs a blunt reminder of The Perils of working in these plants when they build the new a mill it's actually three times the size of the first meal which is washburn's folly pretty much the largest flower Mill in the world at the time the expanding Milling industry was rapidly changing Minneapolis just a few years after statehood The Village had a population of just under 6 000. by the 1880s the city had grown over 20 times that number but a great price was about to be paid for all the productivity in minneapolis's Mill District [Music] one of the problems of Milling which is still a problem today is that as you Mill flour dust could get into the air and flower dust can be quite explosive now Miller's knew of this problem but people hadn't built Mills the size of washburn's mill War flour more flour dust on May 2nd 1878 the evening shift was underway at the Washburn Crosby Company but danger was literally in the air in the a mill somehow a spark sets off flower dust in a absolutely catastrophic exposure it's so big that not only is washburn's Mill destroyed but five other Mills nearby levels essentially several city blocks Windows rattled as far away as Stillwater [Music] 18 men lost their lives there is a memorial to the workers at Lakewood Cemetery in the midst of the ruins of the mill District was a recently arrived Viennese engineer William delabar would later describe a site of the explosion a memorable sad sight the ruins were smoldering and a crew of firemen were still on duty Relic Hunters were busy climbing over the debris visitors from near and far were daily arriving to obtain a view of the disaster William de la Barre who is this engineer from Vienna who's hired by the Minneapolis Millers to improve the physical infrastructure of the Falls area but also as an engineer trained to think about how do we make better machinery filibar had heard of the potential to pull flour out of the air using large exhaust fans and he creates this system it pulls flower dust out of the air into large socks that can be emptied and cleaned and it creates a safer industry and a similar male explosion never happened the first meal it's actually installed in in commercial Enterprise is washburn's new Mill when he rebuilds in 1881. Washburn had another assignment for the engineer Washburn was really fascinated by what was going on in Budapest because Hungarian wheat was the Prime flower at that time Europeans were experimenting with steel rollers instead of the traditional millstones these rollers allowed for a more efficient fine grind and unlike Stones didn't need frequent cumbersome replacement he sent William delabar over to Budapest and he engages in full-blown industrial Espionage so he poses as a Miller gets a job and every night he would come back and sketch this Roller Mill comes back and installs something like that modifying it for washburn's Mill and it's installed in his new Mill in 1881. Washburn has these two innovations one of which makes the industry safer one of which makes it more efficient he gathers his competitors at the Minneapolis Club at The Miller's table and shares this technology with all of them this state-of-the-art structure on the Mississippi River effectively brought to an inn 2 000 years of the millstone and combined with the endless fields of wheat in Western Minnesota and the awesome power of the Saint Anthony Falls made Minneapolis the Milling capital of the world the creation of flour that you could actually just buy at the grocery store this was the original convenience food we have to understand that producing bread flour at the scale the Minneapolis Millers were producing at made it the first industrially produced and widespread carbohydrate in world history and their creation of both a national and then an international market for that carbohydrate had profound effects on the ways in which people ate not just in the region not just in the city but across the country and eventually in other parts of the world [Music] Minneapolis not only becomes a center of Milling but the central kind of grain market for wheat in the United States taking that over from Chicago in the late 1880s and early 1890s so then it becomes a marketing question and who's going to Art Market each other in 1880 the Washburn Crosby Company goes to the first International Miller's Exposition in Cincinnati Ohio and they win the first ever gold medal so they come back and they decide rather than continuing to sell superlative flour which is what they call it at the time perhaps we should rename it Gold Medal Flour [Music] sheet music was also something that was used to promote flour electronic mass media was decades away but the Minneapolis Millers and their ad agencies found creative ways to promote their products the milling companies started publishing cookbooks in the 19th century and the idea there was to sell more flour so if they could give you more recipes to bake a cake or make bread a different way they could sell you more flour they do say in using recipes given in this book requiring flour ask your grocer for and insist upon having that best of all flowers the celebrated gold medal incense so Benjamin ball was the president he was given a number of advertising ideas by the company and each of them began with eventually well bull began to get a little impatient it's like eventually eventually he writes on a piece of paper eventually why not now he crumples it up and throws it in the waste basket James Ford Bell then a young executive with the company pulls that crumpled piece of paper out of the wastebasket and urges Benjamin bold to consider this slogan so what it aspired to be was eventually you'll have the best flower eventually you'll be able to give your family the very best why not now it goes on to become one of the greatest ad slogans ever perhaps the best one ever with the question mark Pillsbury may come up with what I think is a great competing slogan they put it on a sign beaming across the river at General Mills where they have the sign eventually why not now Pillsbury puts up the sign because Pillsbury is best answering general mills's question the competition between the Minneapolis Millers is a really important part of the story but Minneapolis even though it's growing even though it hosts large political conventions it's seen as kind of a center of settlement and what at the time is called the Northwest it's got emerging culture it's attracting migrants from all over the world even though Minneapolis has all those things it's actually a pretty small place and all the major Milling families know each other closely in the boardrooms and in the Mills during the day they're competing with each other they might look at each other as scans when they're talking about pricing flower or trying to compete in markets but then at night they're at the same social Gatherings they're at the Minneapolis club together they're helping create institutions like the Minneapolis Institute of Arts they see themselves literally as the fathers of Minneapolis even though there are many in the city that would disagree with their intent and their orientation they were thinking about their New England ideals relative to Aesthetics Theory but also thinking about their social ideals so let's build a beautiful Park system to help make the city what it is today and let's support the cultural institutions they brought these values related to Nature to Minnesota but they also brought their values about capitalism and opportunity and how you can make money off of nature to Minnesota too we moved from being in a more humble relationship to the river Where the River was bigger than we were and we had to show it some respect but we also didn't think we could hurt it so in a sense what happened at the Falls was we outgrew the river and we changed our relationship from one of having to be respectful to thinking of the river is just another thing we owned and had to manage to make some money with it became a useful industrial commodity for us what they brought to this place was this sense of building a city on a hill and they even brought these transcendental ideas about human relationships to Nature and then they just destroyed the natural Prairie and cut down the whole White Pine Forest and they're doing some really bad things to the environment they're having a really bad impact on a lot of native people they're not shy about flooding burial grounds about displacing people we always wrap that activity in just a sort of necessary evil to make way for progress that's the core irony of all of this that while we were coming with great high ideals to build Minneapolis and they're coming with greedy intentions and it's it's all combined together you can't tease apart these elements of the story they're all part of the same story foreign s across place and class are Central to this story [Music] agriculture gets industrialized as the Industrial Revolution is evolving in the United States that all of these things are are connected together and so in economic Enterprises you have competition and who is going to make the money what then is left for the farmer that is an open question and that is a pressing question in the 1880s and 1890s and early 1900s and we see the rural urban rivalry emerges and you see Farmers organizing in the 1880s and 1890s in Minnesota and in The Dakotas so the Grange also known as the patrons of husbandry was born in Minnesota at the Oliver Kelly Farm in the Years immediately after the Civil War and their farmers were exploring ideas of collective organizing along with Kelly and other Farmers The Grange Founders also included Minnesota's enigmatic Progressive leader Ignatius Donnelly who dramatically characterized the emerging tensions of the times the people are demoralized the newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled public opinions silenced homes covered with mortgages labor impoverished the fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few unprecedented in the history of mankind from the same prolific womb of governmental Injustice we breed two great classes Tramps and millionaires well the Grange was the first formal organization of farmers kind of an unusual organization and in that it was a society a culture it's not quite what we think of a labor union or even a modern farmer organization The Grange worked hard to reduce railroad rates the shipping costs for Farmers as they ship their wheat to places like Minneapolis are actually reduced so that farmers are able to keep more in their own pockets they tried to pressure the owners the grain graters the railroads and made some progress they made political progress particularly by the 1890s would have done even better I believe but 1893 the Panic of that year the financial panic set everyone back the farmers start creating local elevators they build those into a network they start building Community around this notion of cooperation and there's a strong sense of Cooperative movements a strong understanding of cooperation in many different parts of the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains and the creation of the Society of equity in the early 1900s and then the equity Cooperative Exchange in the 19 teens really starts to bring those Farmers together so that a farmer in Western Minnesota might see a farmer in North Dakota or South Dakota and understand that they have something in common and that if they work together economically they can protect grain prices and ensure that more of it lands in their pocket and that idea of farmers organizing spread from Minnesota to North Dakota and and in North Dakota it began in the late 19th century to take on a more political caste as Farmers began to organize they thought let's make a pro farmer league and they called that the nonpartisan League we don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat or socialist we only care if you're for the Farmer they care of whether or not you support their platform and that very quickly catapults them into power in North Dakota they were very radical for their period they were intent on sort of toppling the economic establishment which was of course the business interests of Minneapolis they win the election and they immediately create the State Bank in North Dakota to create a new institution that can support farmers the nonpartisan League are a major political player across the region and of course there are deep-seated threat to the Minneapolis Millers who try to counter these organized farmers in a whole host of ways just as they had been trying to counter-organize labor in the Mills themselves in 1903 despite the stern opposition of leaders of Pillsbury and Washburn Crosby virtually all the meal laborers walked out to demand reasonable wages and work days despite the Union's early success the Millers overwhelmed the strikers with a variety of tactics and their own organizing into what became a Union against unions call the Citizens Alliance those employers began to band together to essentially create solidarity among employers and they called it the citizens Alliance to as we would say put lipstick on the pig mailing owners were very much in line with the citizens Alliance that really did whatever it could to thwart Union organizing so a great economy a booming industry but a very difficult Labor Management relations so the citizens Alliance really got them you know a good deal of power locally and it enabled them to be fighting in the court of public opinion and that continued until the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike would really break that power that kind of concentrated economic power is starting to pay off with concentrated political power in 1903 as the Millers were solidifying this power a brilliant buttonness and scientists from Southeastern Minnesota was experimenting with a different kind of power that he would debut in the following year at the 1904 World's Fair Alexander P Anderson is a fascinating human being from a farmer and he was a reluctant farmer to a scholar he was the man who invented cold cereal and a founder of the modern American breakfast my grandfather was a first generation American Swedish ancestry and he was born in a Dugout in Virtual poverty and they lived in The Dugout for a few Winters and then built a second home Anderson always was interested in books and reading and he was an excellent student he was educated in a one-room school he passed the teacher exam so besides farming when he was like 18 and 19 he taught in one room schools for a number of years but circumstances kept him on the farm mainly he was the one child who seemed to be the one who would have to run the Family Farm for Dad and Mom and keep them alive at the age of 28 he went on to the University of Minnesota and from there went to the University of Munich in Germany up until the age of 28 the farthest he had ever gone from the homestead was to Redwing which was about six to seven miles away and was virtually an all-day trip by buggy so his world was very very small and all of a sudden within just a few years his world widened out considerably this breakthrough came because of his studies in Munich and the idea that such things as wheat and rice at their fundamental level have a microscopic bit of water free water inside them Anderson was fascinated by that idea and what would happen if you could free that water if it indeed existed Anderson moved about to different academic settings including a stint at the prestigious New York Botanical Gardens that's where he made his critical discoveries the Revolutionary discoveries of AP Anderson he put some rice grains into a test tube and then turned that test tube into a vacuum heated the test tube to a particular degree and then cracked the glass and the small bit of moisture that's in the rice grain turned to steam and that wasn't led to an explosion there was rice all over blew up in the air and around them and came down like snow and it expanded the rice grain considerably and he says it came out very puffy in what he calls silky and the first thing that occurred to him is this can be the new bread the modern bread and even feeding the rice to his infant son to see what he thought about it he said he'd ate all the puff rice we could give him [Music] there are test tubes that still exist with ap Anderson's handwriting labeling them AP Anderson is a cousin to John Lind who happens to be the governor of Minnesota you know he just left office Lynn says I will set up a meeting with Minneapolis industrialists money people and you can demonstrate it Minneapolis Business Leaders supported Anderson's research financially but didn't seem to know what to do with it other than control it they were bought out by the Quaker company who also moved slow on utilizing the puffing process they can't figure out what to do with it but they don't want anyone else to have it so he forces their hand Alex says I'm going to go to the 1904 world's fair at St Louis the Meet Me In St Louis World's Fair and I'm going to put on a display and there is where he comes out with his artillery the first time you see the Cannons referred to so he invites people to come and watch the miracle of the exploding rice they had this big two-story net that would catch the race as it came blasting out showered in the air people cheered laughed and and then they would sell the puffed product to people for a nickel a bag they exploded 20 000 pounds of rice and it was uh very enlightening shall we say to the Quaker people who saw we've got something here they thought thought it might be a confection something we add sugar to and sell it as a candy then it occurred to Anderson that perhaps a cereal product would be better Quaker sees a bigger Market some ad man came up with the idea of food shot from Guns which is still used today out of the professor's Canon came a glorious discovery make the puffed rice and puffed wheat the cereal is shot from Guns today in the Quaker Gun Room we still use the professor's discovery the whole grain rice we blow it up 16 times by shooting it from guns so food chat from Guns has now developed into a national phenomena and becomes the first really modern cold cereal he's a professor he's a doctor he's going to tell you this is good for you thanks Professor his picture is there he's a very stately good-looking gentleman so he's a good spokesperson the acceptance of remember the puff cereals Nationwide was a new phenomena in America it was looked upon as a very healthy cereal and I do think that it was America's first fast food a success AP Anderson and his family returned to their home near Red Wing Anderson constructed a state-of-the-art farm and lab he called Tower view reclaiming the homestead of his immigrant parents after he left the farm the farm was lost the mortgage was called and he made it his business to get the farm redeemed and then expand around the farm [Music] you and his family put Scholarships in place wherever he had worked in Clemson and New York and the university and he continued his work and it is truly a quintessentially American story a person born in a Dugout and 35 years later he has reshaped the way the entire country eats breakfast it's a truly remarkable improbable story [Music] Professor Anderson reset America's breakfast table with his Cold Cereal innovation hot cereal from the north was another change to how we ate in 1893 North Dakota Miller's packaged unground Farina as a healthy breakfast porridge called Cream of Wheat the company relocated to Minneapolis to join the food business establishment in the Twin Cities cream of wheat is an early example of a transition away from simple flower and into new products the importance of diversifying and new business strategies was a growing concern and would determine who would ultimately win the generational race between Pillsbury and Washburn Crosby flower prices are down flower consumption is down the thing they've built an Empire around an economic Empire is starting to decline it's important to note is that none of the great flower milling companies are really left it was very important to develop new products to get closer to the consumer and who's going to have the Better Business strategies and understanding the changing economic landscape becomes really important what's interesting is that Washburn Crosby's leadership sees that where it's not clear that pillsbury's leadership sees that and that's another thing that we'll kind of emerge as a difference as both companies move ahead in the years to come but the biggest issue the biggest issue that's faced by the Minneapolis Millers is the loss of their power Monopoly that had always been the foundation of their financial power their economic power their social power their political power even their cultural power in shaping Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly was the actual power of falling water and harnessing that by the late 19 teens you don't need mechanical energy in that same way because you can produce it through coal or other fossil fuels which means you can have flower mills anywhere so in the face of these intersecting crises the Minneapolis Millers are trying to figure out what to do the challenges of the new century were to be faced by new leadership as both CAD wallader Washburn and Charles Pillsbury had passed away the next generation of Executives from these families were taking the ham but the changes in the milling and food industry would be met by a different kind of leader James Ford Bell graduates in the early 1900s from the University of Minnesota with a degree in chemistry now he's going to go on to be one of the state's most important Business Leaders ever he's a chemistry major and that means he has a certain commitment to knowledge making to research and development James Fort Bell is a person who develops from the ground up living in the industry great insights into Milling flower he's being groomed to take over Washburn Crosby and he moves from the ranks of Junior executive into senior executive Bill's vision and Innovation would be needed to meet yet another challenge facing the Milling industry the very product it was built on white red flower is starting to be seen as the enemy there's kind of an outbreak of digestive trouble in America in the late teens and early 1920s there have been a group of Health reformers who've been calling for more fiber in diets Cold Cereal craze takes off in the early 1900s because it's seen as a way to introduce fiber into the American diet and the flower Millers are making flour they're making bread flour they're seen now as part of the problem so the question for them is how can they reinvent themselves in order to cater to these changing consumer types and James Ford Bell keeps saying we've got to do business differently he's able to convince the Washburn Crosby leadership that in fact they need to start investing in other products and one of the first products that washboard Crosby goes to work on is a cold breakfast cereal and after a couple years of work Engineers come up with a product that will eventually become known as Wheaties it's the first non-flower product that's created by Washburn Crosby Wheaties is born but originally it's Washburn Crosby's wheat Flakes and it's not selling very well it's actually a failing product and there is a point at which the board decides and James Ford Bell then the CEO of the company that we should kill this product because it's not going to succeed and Sam Gale then the head of marketing stands up at that moment and he goes but it is succeeding in the markets where we're using the radio to advertise Washburn Crosby in an effort to understand itself as a merchandising company as much as a food manufacturer buys a radio station in Minneapolis the first radio station in the region they Rebrand that radio station as Washburn Crosby Company WCCO and they start using it to advertise and they create a jingle for this Barber Shop quartet to sing promoting weed on Christmas Eve 1926 . have you that's actually the first commercial radio jingle in world history [Music] and crunchy the whole year it had never been done before just the best breakfast food in the land and sales in the listening area go up almost immediately So within a year or two the Washington Crosby Executives figure out that this radio advertising for this new cold breakfast cereal is the way to take over a bigger portion of that cold cereal Market expand that radio advertising in the east of this jingle nationally the difficulty is if you're going to have the jingle you have to actually bring in the four singers to actually sing the song and they brought in the singers in various places Kansas City St Louis Chicago Etc Wheaties takes off it becomes a success [Music] it's whole wheat with all of the brand is what the jingle says and whole wheat with all the brand is the exact opposite of the product that they had been marketing and selling for decades but it's the product that America is most interested in and that allows James Ford Bell to further make his case that in fact this is the future for his company Washburn Crosby Bill's maneuvering and mergers continued James Ford Bell says let's consolidate but let's consolidate strategically by essentially bringing in our competitors let's turn our enemies into our friends this growing National standing was reflected in a new name and they create this new company called General Mills and suddenly General Mills has a national footprint radio across the United States has taken off by the early 1930s as the primary mass media and by the early 1930s General Mills is sponsoring full-blown radio scripted radio programs like Jack Armstrong which is very popular with kids we create the first ever soap opera for radio it was sponsored by Bisquick and it was called Betty and Bob Betty and Bob and it ran for years if we had stuck with it instead of being soap operas perhaps we'd be calling them baking mix operas today because we did do the very first the advertising that General Mills engages in in the 1930s that becomes more and more sophisticated actually is the source of modern sports broadcasting and they start using Wheaties to sponsor Major League Baseball podcasts that's what I mean the spark of a champion Wheaties man Ralph kreiner in action someone came up with a sketch on a piece of paper a box of Wheaties Wheaties The Breakfast of Champions that becomes the sign we put up where the Minneapolis Millers played I'm casting these games for you I get to watch lots of Champs and you know what sparks a champion Sparks you and champions choose Wheaties so it's the domination of the airwaves and in particular sports broadcasters that's the way that they ensure a healthy future and grow into that future Breakfast of Champions General Mills in the 1930s will be one of the very few large corporations in America that has a quarterly profit consistently through the very difficult years of the Great Depression cold breakfast cereal is not a is not a high-end product it's a product that more and more people are turning to as a way to get a nutritious energy field as the advertising copy often said breakfast so Wheaties are our first cereal in 1924 kicks cereal that's 1938 and another cold breakfast cereal called cheery oats and that name is quickly changed to Cheerios in the early 1940s why uh Cheerios breakfast gives you the power protein that grown-ups need to help stay in trim full of whole wheat energy in every flake today is Wheaties breakfast just as the Millers changed how we ate their marketing changed popular culture Lone Ranger Mystery Adventures are we owned the Lone Ranger created the shows Cowboy Champion Bob made it do you still eat Wheaties you bet your boots I do folks all over the country are eating their Wheaties and doing basketball champion [Music] one of the big G cereals from General Mills there's a whole kernel of wheat in every Wheaties plate and I'll give you some new Frosty old among all these beloved mascots celebrities and animated pitch people was a fictitious food Maven who was also made up but made a lasting impact hello I'm Betty Crocker I guess every family has its own kind of problems so Betty Crocker is a customer service story at the very beginning it was genius stroke to decide that it should be signed by a woman and her name became Betty Crocker crocker named after one of our favorite directors at the time Betty because it sounded friendly the women in the consumer Services Group all submitted a signature one of those signatures was chosen and it's still the logo for Betty Crocker today you don't have to be an expert when you use my cake mix and within 21 years she's the second best known woman in America second only to Eleanor Roosevelt she got 5 000 letters a day and multiple proposals of marriage Betty Crocker and her staff had already given years many have worked to create the presence of Betty Crocker including a food Pioneer who had long imagined herself in this role when I was 14 I got my first Betty Crocker's cookbook and I saw the pictures of the women the home economists working in the kitchens the test kitchens and I said that's what I want to do I want to be Betty Crocker that's my dream job I've always wanted to be Betty Crocker thank you I went through my training and learned the Betty Crocker way and I worked on many products during my tenure at General Mills I think my first assignment was on Hamburger Helper and they were just starting to develop it by the time we get to a product like Hamburger Helper she's helping you make a quick meal for your family one pan one Skillet one meal and that's the role Betty plays not just in cookbooks not just in advice but also in the creation of products particularly convenient Foods when they did the new portrait of Betty Crocker on the 75th Anniversary they called me to be on the panel of Judges they took essays from women across the country and they took these letters saying why they thought they personified Betty Crocker and we looked at all these letters we never saw we didn't know who the people were we just read their letters and we decided which ones were the best well it turned out that they had a mixed group of women that were the winners they were of all ages of all ethnic groups and married and single and they were just they were wonderful so they took these women that were the winners and they took photographs of them and then they digitally merged all those photographs into one person and then had somebody paint the portrait that is the current portrait of Betty the one we're still using and that Betty looks a bit more like all of America and a little less like she might have been only from Minnesota I think the Betty Crocker Persona is of a person who a knows what she's doing B loves to cook C is kind of maternal and friendly and and you know we'll listen to your problems and I wanted to be that kind of a person and so I thought I'm Betty Crocker Betty Crocker was joined by another fictional kitchen Confidant named Ann Pillsbury she never caught on like her rival across the river but the Pillsbury Bake Off did transcend its marketing Origins to become an American tradition experimenters of all ages and backgrounds even a handful of men [Music] through the second half of the 20th century the two major Millers had evolved into Global corporate entities whose Holdings included a wide range of food products from Betty Crocker Kitchens here and much more the companies become holding companies with many companies underneath launching things like Plato clue the Nerf ball we also had fashion companies like Talbots and Eddie Bauer Pillsbury will develop products like cake mix eventually refrigerated dough which brings us the Doughboy Burger King Burger King created and launched by Pillsbury Pillsbury buys the Minnesota Valley canning company that actually dates in 1907 in Le Sueur Minnesota they create the Green Giant they buy tatino's pizza they're the number one selling pizza by volume in America and that's based on Rose Totino and her restaurant right here in North Minneapolis all of these things get connected through the roll-up of companies like Pillsbury or General Mills they competed aggressively across the river from each other for a hundred years now they're together under one umbrella underneath of General Mills city is still one of the world's flower capitals and home for big name milling companies the cultural desires of these people have built fine museums and good libraries Justice or profits were growing The Miller's giving continued to grow and shape Minnesota throughout the 20th century Minnesota is a philanthropic Powerhouse I think for each of those families they've been a part of the philanthropic infrastructure of the state for a number of years but also an even more critical part of the Civic infrastructure philanthropy is important here it is an expectation that you give both your time and personal and organizational resources I think those Milling families were an important part of that strategy these things are connected the Mills created Minneapolis here is the world's largest cash grain market and all the Enterprises of Institutions necessary for the business of the region this dominion over food and Industry also raises a number of questions so if we think about the flower Milling industry in Minneapolis as the first place where industrial carbohydrates were created as a place where they were sustained and then of course they were modified in the 20s and 30s and 40s According to some reformers and health professionals carbohydrates are the bane of the American diet carbohydrates are the source of obesity and diabetes and a host of health problems that cost the United States billions of dollars in health care issues every year so the stakes are really high when we're talking about industrial carbohydrates and yet we don't think about the intricate relationships and networks that have been built over time that shape the ways we imagine food the ways we consume food as well as the actual food products themselves history is about asking questions about the world and trying to figure out how things came to be and there's nothing more human than looking out into the world and asking the question why why is that there why did that turn out the way it did people all over the world knew about Minneapolis because of the flower in their kitchens came in a bag that said Minneapolis right on it three two what happened here to build Minneapolis into the city that it became [Music] it's a complicated story what it meant to the owners and the workers and the farmers but it's also Illuminating to the whole nature of Minnesota it really tells us a lot about who we are today foreign [Music] this program is made possible by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund [Music]

Channel: Twin Cities PBS

Views: 747,590

Keywords: twin cities pbs, tpt, ktca, twin cities public television, minnesota, twin cities, history of milling, mill city, flour milling, general mills, gold medal flour, documentary, mn history, history, cheerios, pillsbury, wheaties, milling, full documentary, mill city flour, flour industry, breakfast cereal, farmers, wheat

Id: w8zlDoquXww

Length: 56min 41sec (3401 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023