The Creator of Post Cereal & the Mass Misinformation Campaign against Coffee

Once upon a time the “complete breakfast” that we see in every cereal commercial was under attack from inside the very industry that created it — Post Cereal and its owner, C. W. Post.

Charles Wiliam Post, with “his ubiquitous advertising, self-righteousness, posturing grandiosity, and propaganda against ‘coffee nerves,’” set out to villainize coffee as a way of promoting his own coffee substitute (Uncommon Grounds, 91), a grain-based anti-coffee.

The story of Charles Post is an interesting example of how misinformation and bad behavior from corporate-minded people can dominate a cultural moment.

In 1888, Post checked into a sanitarium to rest after a nervous breakdown. The guru at this particular sanitarium was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who preached against coffee and served a coffee substitute at his institution.

When Post left the sanitarium he adopted Kellogg’s anti-coffee evangel and produced a coffee substitute of his own, grain-based just like the one he’d been served at the sanitarium.

This crass robbery of both attitude and product made Post a rich man.

While C.W. Post may have had few scruples about truth and integrity, he did have some very successful marketing ideas.

In the 1890s, Post sold and marketed “Postum” with the claim that “you can recover from any ordinary disease by discontinuing coffee and poor food, and using Postum Food Coffee,” his branded cereal-based substitute (Uncommon Grounds, 93).

A lavish advertising budget and a belief in the power of marketing propelled Post’s Postum into wid-spread popularity. But it wasn’t just a simple belief in the power of advertising that made Postum such a cultural phenomenon.

The marketing innovation Post is credited with is the negative ad campaign. And this is the cornerstone of his legacy today, when it comes to perceptions of coffee anyway.

He attacked coffee with full force, claiming that it harmed the nerves and caused other maladies, making these claims in newspaper ads across the country — despite a complete lack of scientific evidence.

He spent famously on his advertising campaigns and proclaimed a variety of made-up “facts” about how coffee would stunt childrens’ growth and lower their grades in school (“The Devious Ad Campaign That Convinced America Coffee Was Bad for Kids,” The Atlantic). He made up stories and put them in newspapers across the United States — and some of those stories are still with us today as the result of his talent for fiction and fear-mongering.

The legacy of C.W. Post is fascinating, in part, because it seems to mirror certain contemporary trends.

Post set out to gas-light a nation, trying to sell a product that he convinced himself to believe in. He chose to create untruths that have a legacy of their own, lingering in the public mind despite their nature as complete fabrications.

He showed his own generation that if you can just speak with a loud enough voice, not only can you shape the marketplace, you can create a demand that had never previously existed. That is a powerful marketing idea.

But it also shows the power of fiction that masquerades as truth, which has far more disquieting implications.