A Century of Innovation
Inside the box at Kellogg's: How the cereal giant keeps its product pipeline fresh
BATTLE CREEK, MICH.--Chris Keller has an achy right knee that he desperately wants to keep healthy enough to permit a few rounds of springtime golf now that the weather has finally warmed up. So about the last thing Keller wants to be doing right now is walking quickly through a manufacturing plant, gingerly stepping over cables and tubing while avoiding all the slippery spots on the floor. But that's exactly what he's doing on this fine spring afternoon. Not that Keller has a choice. As operations manager at cereal-and-snack giant Kellogg's research institute, he's responsible for giving VIP tours of the company's 150,000-square-foot pilot-projects plant and the adjoining 9,000-square-foot process lab. Housed together, these facilities are where Kellogg food scientists cook up the latest prototypes of potential new products.
The lab, in Keller's words, is a "sort of super-industrial-strength kitchen." Very much Martha Stewart meets Madame Curie, it's crammed with ovens and burners, mixers and food processors galore. "If a scientist sitting at his desk has an idea and wants to try something," Keller explains, "he can just come in here to get an early read on if it will work." Researchers can also take advantage of some 3,000 to 4,000 ingredients stocked in the lab. There are the usual suspects--flour, sugar, chocolate chips--as well as more exotic ones that you probably wouldn't find in your home pantry, like freeze-dried asparagus and more than 50 types of vanilla and vanilla flavors. If the small batches of new cereals or snack bars from the lab seem tasty enough, the recipe is then attempted in the pilot plant, where food can be produced in far larger test batches. It contains scaled-down versions of equipment found in Kellogg's full-scale manufacturing plant.
But as much as it's Keller's job to help guests understand how Kellogg innovates, it's also his responsibility to make sure they don't see quite everything. He always keeps a few strides ahead of his visitors, and he always makes sure that he's first around every corner. On this day, Keller quickly hustles the tour past a row of tall metal racks in the lab. They're packed with small amounts of cereal and snack prototypes. Some have clandestine-sounding code names like "Project Moon" or "Project Parfait." Others are just labeled "chunky" or "mint."
Later on, as the tour enters the pilot plant, Keller stops abruptly in front of yet another vat of brown flakes. Like a factory traffic cop, he thrusts out his upraised palm as he inspects the cereal. "OK, we can walk by it," he finally shouts over the drone of conveyor belts, extruders, and other machinery. "But I am not going to tell you what it is!"
Flaky. You can't really blame the folks at Kellogg's for treating the W.K. Kellogg Institute as if it's a culinary Area 51. Transparency hasn't exactly been the company's friend throughout its history. Back in 1894, Will Keith Kellogg was working at the famed Battle Creek sanitarium founded by his brother, John Harvey Kellogg. Searching for a bread substitute by boiling wheat, the brothers accidentally discovered the process for making cereal flakes. In 1906, production of toasted cornflakes began at W.K. Kellogg's newly formed Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. But Kellogg failed to successfully patent the flake-toasting process or trademark the name "Toasted Corn Flakes." Battle Creek quickly become home to dozens of toasted-flake purveyors, and the original cereal company changed its name to Kellogg Co.
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