Quaker Oats Company

Quaker Oats Company, former (1901–2001) Chicago-based American manufacturer of oatmeal and other food and beverage products. The company changed its name to Quaker Foods and Beverages after being acquired by PepsiCo, Inc., in 2001.

The Quaker Oats trademark was registered in 1877 by Henry Parsons Crowell (1855–1944), an Ohio milling company owner who in 1891 joined with two other millers, Robert Stuart and Ferdinand Schumacher, in creating the American Cereal Company. By the late 1890s a management conflict had broken out between the three men. At first Schumacher forced out Stuart and Crowell, but they returned in a share and proxy war, ejected Schumacher, and in 1901 converted American Cereal into the Quaker Oats Company. By this time Quaker was producing oat and wheat cereals, hominy, corn meal, baby food, and animal feed. Crowell, president until 1922, was succeeded by Stuart’s son John, who presided for 34 years, working with his younger brother R. Douglas Stuart, a promotional genius.

By the late 20th century the company had added hundreds of food products (e.g., Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal and Aunt Jemima syrup, mixes, and frozen waffles and pancakes). Following the corporate trend of the 1960s and ’70s, the company diversified into chemical products, restaurant chains, and the toy industry, acquiring the toy company Fisher-Price in 1969. Most of these assets were sold by the early 1990s, however, as Quaker refocused on its food products, which came to include snack products and additional breakfast cereals. It moved into the beverage market through the acquisition of Stokley–Van Camp, the maker of Gatorade sport drink, in 1983 and of Snapple, a bottler of iced teas and fruit drinks, in 1994. Although lagging sales caused Quaker to sell the Snapple business in 1997, the company continued to expand the Gatorade brand by introducing nutritional drinks and snacks.

In 1997 Quaker agreed to pay more than $1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that in the 1940s and ’50s company researchers had secretly exposed institutionalized children in Massachusetts to oatmeal containing radioactive iron and calcium in order to obtain scientific evidence that would allow the company to match the advertising claims of rival brand Cream of Wheat. The events surrounding the controversy were documented in the book The State Boys Rebellion (2004) by Michael D’Antonio.