The man credited with inventing the legendary breakfast food Pop-Tarts has died aged 96.
William “Bill” Post was working as a manager for the Michigan-based Hekman Biscuit Company, later renamed Keebler, when Kellogg's outsourced an idea to the company to develop a breakfast biscuit for the toaster.
In various interviews over the years, Post said that many of his colleagues at the time were against his Pop Tart idea. In the project they were known as fruit scones, the name was changed to Pop Tart to capitalize on the 1960s pop art phenomenon.
“There were so many naysayers. Some of my good friends said, “I don't know Bill.” “They would tell us that's not such a good idea,” he said in a 2021 interview.
Post began working for the company on his 16th birthday and took a break after World War II to serve his country in occupied Japan.
William “Bill” Post, a pioneer in the world of breakfast foods, passed away on February 10th
According to CNBC, Pop-Tarts generates around $1 billion in annual sales in the United States alone
After returning from military service, Post worked his way up at Keebler. According to his obituary, it was 1964 when Kellogg's called with a request for a toastable breakfast treat.
Post told WWMT in 2021 that the challenge of his idea was placing a second layer of dough on top of the filling. “To achieve this, I had to break every rule,” he said in a corporate video produced by Kellogg's.
Once this was achieved, it took only four months for the company to produce enough samples (around 10,000) to send out for testing. The four original flavors were strawberry, blueberry, apple currant and brown sugar cinnamon.
The flavors sold out quickly, so an additional 45,000 had to be ordered immediately, which also sold out.
“They just flew off the shelves.” Kellogg's took out a large-page ad: “Oops! We screwed up! “Sorry, we ran out of Pop-Tarts. We've been going from there ever since,” Post told Fox 17 in 2023.
According to CNBC, Pop-Tarts generates around $1 billion in annual sales in the United States alone. This year, Jerry Seinfeld will make his directorial debut with Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story for Netflix.
“I used to bring home a lot of things, samples that would be run, and they would turn up their noses because they didn't like this or that. But they always asked me, “Bring these fruit scones home.” That’s what we initially called them internally. Fruit scones. “Are you bringing some of these home, Dad?” he told the Associated Press in 2003.
Post retired in 1985 as senior vice president of Keebler with a salary of $92,000 and later returned to Kellogg's as a consultant.
After a few years of success, the frosting was added, with critics again arguing that it would make a sticky mess in toasters across the country. Post later said that it took a day to perfect a formula that worked.
The four original flavors were strawberry, blueberry, apple currant and brown sugar cinnamon, but new flavors have been added rapidly since then
Over the years, the Pop Tarts brand has grown far beyond the original concept
For the frosting, Post came up with the idea after running some Pop-Tarts through a cookie icing machine.
He took some of the glazed Pop-Tarts to show to Bill Lamothe, a Kellogg executive responsible for developing the pastry at the company. Lamothe later became chairman and chief executive officer of Kellogg.
“So I came to Battle Creek with a toaster in my hand and frosting on Pop-Tarts,” Post says. “We put them in the toaster and showed him that they didn't melt. And he said, “Wow, that’s really something.”
Within an hour, Lamothe instructed Post to freeze all types of Pop-Tarts, a quick decision that exemplified Kellogg's entrepreneurial spirit at the time, Post says.
“With this one decision made in one day, we simply doubled the market,” he says. “That’s how keen Kellogg is at spotting trends.”
Over the years, competitors such as Pillsbury, Nabisco and Post have introduced their own toaster pastries, with varying degrees of success.
In an interview with WWNT in 2021, Post said that he still ate Pop-Tarts regularly, preferring to eat strawberries cold.
“Bill would say, 'I assembled a great team that developed Kellogg's concept of a shelf-stable toaster pastry into a fine product that was brought to market in just 'four months,'” his online tribute reads.
Post was married for most of his life to his high school sweetheart, Florence, who died in 2020.
Bob Keith, a professor of nutrition and food science at Auburn University, says there's nothing wrong with occasionally eating a Pop-Tart for breakfast.
“They're fortified with certain vitamins.” “They contain some sugar, but they're not really high in fat,” says Keith. “So, for example, if you were to eat this Pop-Tart with a glass of milk in the morning, that would be an acceptable breakfast for some breakfasts that week.”