If you grew up in the Midwest, there’s a good chance you sat down to a hot bowl of Cream of Wheat cereal on a cold winter morning. For 74 years, this breakfast mainstay was produced in Northeast Minneapolis.
Cream of Wheat got its start, however, in North Dakota.
In 1893, Tom Amidon was the head miller at Diamond Milling Co. in Grand Forks. During the wheat milling process, the bran and the wheat germ are removed, leaving farina. Amidon began taking the grits-like farina home with him, and his wife use it to make a breakfast porridge.
Times were tough — it was the economic Panic of 1893 — and Diamond Milling was losing money. Amidon convinced the mill owners, Emery Mapes, George Bull and George Clifford, to package the farina and sell it. It took a while for Amidon to convince his bosses, but they finally agreed to send 50 packages — Mapes, a printer, had an unused mockup — to a customer in New York, along with a load of flour. They named it “Cream of Wheat” because of its white appearance. The customer sent back a message, “Forget the flour, send more Cream of Wheat!”
The product was introduced to consumers at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Diamond Milling soon began manufacturing only Cream of Wheat. Business writer Dick Howe wrote in the Sept. 3, 1961 Tribune, “According to Daniel [George’s son] Bull’s battered log book, the flour mill sold 854 cases of cereal in 1896. The next year, with 15,654 cases sold, the company moved to Minneapolis.” Production increased to 365,000 cases and Cream of Wheat paid its first dividend in 1900. “We’ve paid a dividend every year since then,” Bull proudly told Howe.
Cream of Wheat even appeared on the menu of the Hotel Nicollet, where in 1928 you could have a breakfast bowl for 15 cents.
Mapes, Bull and Clifford soon moved to Minneapolis, where they built large houses near Lake of the Isles and started construction on a new manufacturing plant.
Their facility, completed in 1904, was located on a downtown lot at 5th and 1st Ave. N. The mill owners took out a 99-year lease on the lot. The six-story yellow brick building was built in the “City Beautiful” style, its façade adorned with medallions and columns. It was designed by Harry Wild Jones. According to the Nov. 19, 1904 Minneapolis Journal, “The floors are built to withstand easily a pressure of 300 pounds per square foot.”
Cream of Wheat was manufactured on the third floor; company offices, a shipping room and a board of directors room occupied the ground floor. Within 13 years, the manufacturing floor was deemed inadequate, and the owners began looking for another place to make cereal. The building was abandoned, then turned into a parking garage and finally torn down for a parking lot in 1939. It’s still there, across the street from the Loon Cafe. Benjamin Berger of West Realty bought out Cream of Wheat’s 99-year lease in 1949.
The owners settled on a site at 730 Stinson Blvd. NE, former farmland that was just undergoing development after World War I. The 170,000 square-foot, steel-and-concrete building that arose there was designed in the Moderne style by Walter H. Wheeler. The 125-foot tower held a water tank for a gravity-fed sprinkler system. Tanks for storing grain were lined up along one side, and railroad tracks ran through the ground floor for unloading grain cars. Construction costs were pegged at $1 million. It would be the company’s home for 74 years.
“Cream of Wheat’s grounds were popular with community children as a place to roller-skate and picnic,” said Northeast Park resident Melo Janski, quoted by Margo Ashmore in the Aug. 25, 1993 Northeaster. Northeast resident Karl Bavolak remembered it as being “a nice spot to stop, at the edge of the city, like going to the country.”
Advertising pioneers
The founders of Cream of Wheat weren’t content to sell their product on nutrition alone. They soon proved to be masters of marketing.
They hired illustrators such as N.C. Wyeth, J. C. Leyendecker and Henry Hutt to depict their products in use, and advertised in Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s and Woman’s Home Companion. They appeared on the sides of trolley cars, too.
A 1920 ad illustrated by John G. Scott showed a chubby little barefoot boy with a fishing pole and a poem that read, “Little Simon went a fishin’/for to catch a whale. He caught one, and what’s more/he caught it by its tail. You ask how Simon gained the strength/to do this wondrous feat! The answer is he gained his strength/by eating Cream of Wheat.”
They placed the newspaper equivalent of a public service announcement with “Jessie’s Notebook,” an ad that looked like a newspaper column that promoted various ways of preparing Cream of Wheat. One included the addition of jam. (“Red jams are the prettiest!”)
They also put radio to good use. During the 1930s, KSTP-AM aired the Cream of Wheat program daily at 7:45 a.m., just in time for breakfast. This jingle was broadcast regularly in the 1940s:
Cream of Wheat is so good to eat
And we have it everyday.
You sing a song and it makes you
strong
And it makes you shout “Hooray”
It’s good for growing babies
and grownups too, to eat.
For all the family’s breakfast
You can’t beat Cream of Wheat
Cream of Wheat’s most enduring (and later, controversial) advertising spokesperson was “Rastus,” a Black “chef” who appeared at the top of each cereal box. During the company’s early years, Emery Mapes was dining in Chicago when he noticed a “toothy colored waiter” and paid him $5 to pose for a photo. The man is believed to be Frank White, who died in 1938. His obituary in the Leslie, Mich., Local-Republican described him as a “famous chef” who “posed for an advertisement of a well-known breakfast food.” Initially depicted in its ads by Cream of Wheat as an illiterate former slave, Frank White’s image (or another like it) was on the package until after the death of George Floyd in 2020, when it was replaced by a stalk of wheat.
Cream of Wheat was one of the first companies to use advertising premiums. A 1936 Cream of Wheat newspaper ad offered a premium. For 10 cents you could get a Rastus doll to cut out, sew and stuff.
Acquired by Nabisco
Cream of Wheat, although it concentrated its production on its original product, was not necessarily a one-trick pony. Quick-cooking Cream of Wheat was introduced in 1938; it was ready to eat in five minutes instead of 20. Twenty years later cereal chemist Franklin Sorensen devised Instant Cream of Wheat. “He was very proud of his discovery and so was I,” said his wife, Star Tribune food editor Mary Hart. “It cooked in a lot less time than regular Cream of Wheat and came along when women were wanting to spend less time in the kitchen.”
Cream of Wheat had 8,000 stockholders and annual sales averaging $1.3 million when it was acquired by National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) in 1961 for $30 million. The company’s 110 production employees stayed on at the Stinson plant, while 36-year-old Daniel Bull, who had taken his father’s place as company president the year before, moved to Nabisco’s headquarters in New York. It’s not clear how many of the 65 office employees followed him.
The acquisition gave Cream of Wheat access to more research and development, and it wasn’t long before flavored versions — maple, chocolate, banana — joined the lineup on grocery store shelves.
Kraft Foods, a division of Phillip Morris, acquired Nabisco in 2000. It wasn’t long before Kraft decided to shut down some of its manufacturing plants and move production elsewhere. In 2001, Ann Merrill of the Star Tribune described the closing of the Cream of Wheat plant.
“The morning of May 15 started like any other day at the plant, with the day shift workers arriving for their 7 a.m. start time,” she wrote. “All morning, they were told individually there would be a meeting at 1.
“There was, of course, speculation. Some thought a new product might be coming to the plant. Others feared layoffs, but few suspected the worst.
“The plant, the sole producer of Cream of Wheat cereal, employs 120 workers. Many of them are well along in their careers, earning wages of $18 an hour at the unionized plant,” Merrill continued. “The Cream of Wheat brand has struggled in recent years because of consumers’ desire for convenience foods such as granola bars and other eat-on-the-run breakfast items. The Minneapolis plant makes about 56 million pounds of Cream of Wheat annually, down from 70 million pounds eight years ago.”
For maintenance worker Al Warzecha, who had worked at Cream of Wheat for 30 years, the closing “came out of the blue.” Another 30-year employee, Ed Bradley, hoped Kraft would give employees “an honorable, gracious way out rather than the leather boot.”
Four years after the building was shuttered, a group of developers bought it for $5 million. In 2007, the Cream of Wheat building underwent a $31 million conversion into condominiums – the CW Lofts.
Cream of Wheat building in downtown Minneapolis, designed by Harry Wild Jones, who also designed the Lakewood Cemetery chapel. (Hennepin County Library)
The Cream of Wheat building on Stinson Blvd. NE, designed by Walter H. Wheeler. The 125-foot tower held a water tank for a gravity-fed sprinkler system. (Hennepin County Library)
Sources:
www.jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2004/december.htm
Millet, Larry, “The 1904 Cream of Wheat factory was a rare, classical beauty,” Star Tribune, Dec. 26, 2020
Paul, Herb, “Old Cream of Wheat Site Sold to West Realty,” Minneapolis Star, Jan. 15, 1949
Howe, Dick, “Cream of Wheat Finds Nourishment at National Biscuit,” Sept. 3, 1961
“F.L. Sorensen, food chemist, instant cereal expert, dies at 65,” Star Tribune, Sept. 16, 1986
Ashmore, Margo, “Commerce flourished at city’s edge: Northwestern Terminal kept things moving,” Aug. 25, 1993
Merrill, Ann, “End of the Line,” Star Tribune, May 2001