of Snap, Crackle & Pop: Ferdinand Schumacher
Ferdinand Schumacher, of Akron, helped
found the American breakfast food industry in 1856 when he opened the
German Mills American Oatmeal Company. It was one of three companies that
combined in 1901 to form the
Quaker Oats Company, a diversified global
corporation that sells about $2 billion worth of products each
year. Schumacherís oatmeal is still the favorite of 6 out of every 10
people who eat hot breakfast food. They buy more than $500 million worth
of Quaker Oats every year. Modern science has proven Schumacher correct in
regarding oatmeal as healthy food.
Quaker Oats blazed a new health trail
in 1996. It became the first company with the U. S. Food and Drug
Administrationís permission to claim that its product could reduce the
risk of heart disease. Oatmeal packages soon began displaying the notice:
"Diets high in oatmeal or oat bran and low in saturated fat and
reduce the risk of heart disease."
Eating oats and oat bran reduces the
amount of cholesterol in the blood. Millions of people in the United
States have high blood cholesterol levels that increase the risk of heart
attacks, the nationís No.1 killer. For some people, a bowlful of oatmeal
each day lowers blood cholesterol levels almost as much as
Popularizing a New Food
Oats? People donít eat oats. Horses eat oats. Thatís what most Americans
thought before Ferdinand Schumacher immigrated to Akron in 1851 from
Hanover, Germany, and introduced the country to a new people-food.
Schumacher opened a grocery on Howard Street, and expected ground oats to
sell like hotcakes. They did back home in Germany, and in Ireland,
Scotland, and other countries. People knew that oat "porridge" was so
nutritious that you could practically live on it. Oats were inexpensive
enough for almost everyone to afford a good meal. And they tasted good,
Americans, however, wondered why
Schumacher was selling horse food. In 1854, Schumacher invented a machine
to chop oats into small cubes, which he packed into glass jars and sold.
The cubed oats were so popular that, in 1856, he bought an old factory
along the canal and installed machinery that processed 20 big wooden
barrels of oats a day. That was the start of Schumacherís German Mills
American Oatmeal Company. Schumacher discovered a way to make oats cook
faster. He pre-cooked whole oat berries, which have a hard outer shell,
and than ran them between rollers to produce flakes, or "rolled oats."
Demand for oats in the U.S. increased when the
Civil War started, and the Union Army bought tons to feed hungry soldiers.
It enabled Schumacher in 1863 to move production to a bigger factory on
Mill Street in Akron, which now is the site of Quaker Square, a hotel and
entertainment complex. As oatsī popularity grew, so did Schumacherís
reputation. People called him "The Oatmeal King." His kingdom, however,
was only part of the realm that became the Quaker Oats Company.
Schumacher also invented the process
for making Quaker Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat, breakfast cereals
introduced in 1913 with the advertising slogan, "Shot from guns." They
boosted Quaker sales by 30-fold. He called the process "pneumatic
levitation" because it blew "puffed" cereal through kilometers of pipes
from one mill to another, giving rise to the expression "shot from guns."
The puffing process involves processing wheat or rice in a hot pressure
chamber and then suddenly releasing the pressure, so that the grain
expands to many times its original size.