Postum

John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-day Adventist with a stomach of steel and a colon the size of Rhode Island, found himself ruling over the Battle Creek Sanatorium, a health haven where blandness reigned supreme. A vegetarian with a mission to banish pork chops from breakfast tables, Kellogg embarked on a noble quest: bran-tastic food that wouldn't gag a maggot. 

Enter his brother, Will Keith, whose official title at the Sanatorium was "general office assistant" but whose real talent lay in making things, like, say, edible. Together, they birthed Granose in 1895, a wheat flake cereal that could double as dental floss. Delicious? Debatable. Easy to chew? Absolutely!

Meanwhile, a former Kellogg patient named Charles William Post was brewing trouble (or rather, a wheat and molasses beverage called Postum). Post, a marketing whiz with a flair for the dramatic, launched a full-scale assault on coffee, blaming the poor bean for everything from divorce to dandruff. His solution? Postum, of course, the magical elixir that promised to cure all ills (except, perhaps, for tastelessness).

Postum was a hit, and Post, emboldened by his success, set his sights on breakfast domination. His first attempt, Grape Nuts, flopped as a beverage (turns out, people don't crave lukewarm, maltose-infused wheat water). But as fate would have it, this "failure" found new life as a cereal, its crunchy, nut-not-quite-nut flavor winning over legions of breakfasters. So there you have it: a surgeon, his brother, and a coffee-obsessed ex-patient, all unwittingly changing the breakfast landscape, one bland flake and questionable marketing campaign at a time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go find some decent coffee to erase the memory of this entire story.

Source Encyclopedia of Trivia