From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
Toasted breakfastcereal flakes made from a mixture of milled corn, sugar, malt flavoring, vitamins and minerals, invented by brothers John Harvey and W.K. Kellogg in 1894, when a cooking experiment went wrong. The Kelloggs were working on new foods that would improve the health of patients in the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a facility that treated health-conscious, vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists. A boiled wheat mixture was left overnight by accident, and the brothers, who were on a very tight budget, decided to roll out the mixture in the hopes of creating long sheets of dough. The mixture broke up into flakes, and the Kelloggs decided to toast the flakes and see if their patients liked them anyway. They did, and the brothers' experiments with developing nutritious grain-based cereals continued. Prototypes of cornflakes were made with whole kernels of corn, but were scrapped in favor of a version made with milled corn and malt flavoring, two of the main ingredients in today's cornflakes. Today, the cereal is used not only as a main morning meal but also crushed as a coating to make crispy, deep-fried or baked foods. Kelloggs refers to its cornflakes as Kellogg's Corn Flakes®.
