Original subtitles

- Over 250 million HERSHEY Bars a year.

More than 650 million bottles of HEINZ Ketchup.

1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola a day.

Over 300 billion McDonald's burgers sold.

These iconic brands fuel modern America,

helping to drive the most powerful economy on Earth.

But 150 years ago, they don't exist.

At a time of unimaginable change,

it takes brave visionaries risking everything

to create some of the most

recognizable empires on the planet.

- I call it the MILKY WAY.

- Well that's a first.

- It's chaos out there.

- Fire, fire!

- Get out everything, the back door!

- Start working!

- This is a federal seizure.

- Innovators like Henry Heinz, Milton Hershey

and Clarence Birdseye push the limits of technology.

- This is the future and I need it.

- American dynasties like Post and Kellogg's,

battle each other to build their fortunes.

- We should be making stacks of money off of this.

- You're not capable.

- I'm going to bury you.

- And bold pioneers like the McDonald brothers.

- Flip 'em, let's go.

- And Colonel Sanders.

Face the challenges

of a cutthroat new era of opportunity.

- Hershey isn't our supplier, they're our competition.

- These billion dollar empires

are American icons.

- The American people will never forget the name McDonalds.

- That help transform the country

into the most powerful nation on Earth.

This is the story of how they all began.

- It's been ten years

since the end of the Civil War

and one of the most important eras of America's history

is just getting started.

It'll be called the Industrial Revolution,

and it will usher in a wave of unbridled entrepreneurship.

- I look at those early days of burgeoning industry

and I think this is an amazing opportunity, you know?

Who doesn't wanna be successful?

Who does wanna, you know, change the world

and make quite a bit of money doing it?

I think that's the brass ring.

You might come up with this great iconic American brand

and the brand that shapes America.

- Before industrialization, when people live on farms,

they're pretty nearly self-sufficient.

But all the people who live in cities

for the first time in history of the United States,

they've got to be fed by somebody else.

- The Industrial Revolution is a time

when you start seeing factories developing,

but part of that is the phenomenon of urbanization.

People were coming together as a workforce

and living in cities more and more.

Life was changing for people

and it was changing very quickly.

- Nearly a third of Americans flood into cities

without space to grow their own food,

causing a crisis and an opportunity.

- No longer could you go to your hen house, get egg.

No longer would your wife cook you up some fresh chicken

that she just slaughtered on your front porch.

There was this need to sort of feed the masses.

- People were moving to cities from farms in America.

And the mass production of food was very unusual.

In fact, it didn't exist and this was a really big deal.

- In one of the fastest growing cities,

one struggling entrepreneur pursues his ambition

of selling his products all across the country.

But he's about to hit rock bottom.

His name is Henry Heinz.

- Where are the rest of the checks?

The checks, where are they?

Give me half.

Hurry.

Listen to me.

These paychecks will clear but only if they go out today.

You have to get to the post office before it closes.

- Pittsburgh Police.

We have a warrant for the arrest of Henry Heinz.

- Sir?

- Here, go to the post office, then straight home.

Families are depending on this, do you understand me?

Go.

- On December 15, 1875 local authorities arrest

31 year old Henry Heinz.

A company built on his name will someday sell

for 23 billion dollars.

But for now, after taking out loans to expand production

on his horse radish sauce, he has overreached on a product

that doesn't sell enough to keep it in business.

- With every new development,

every innovation in the food production process,

when you're sort of near the cutting edge

of the way things are going, this is the riskiest edge.

- Heinz started buying more and more produce.

He bought out whole farms.

But when creditors came calling, he couldn't pay.

So he was arrested for fraud.

But, it wasn't his fault.

At the time, packaged foods were not commonly eaten

in the United States.

- In the late 1800's,

food preservation is still primitive.

Small, local farmers bring their products into cities,

where they sit on shelves or in barrels for days,

or sometimes even weeks.

- The state of food in America was pretty deplorable.

Remember, there's no refrigeration.

Grocers often didn't care

where their products were coming from.

They were selling spoiled meat.

Fish was a little bit off.

When people bought things in barrels,

you never knew what you were gonna get.

- Pickles were colored with copper

to make them look more green.

They'd put laundry bluing in milk to make it look white.

You had to trust your own ability

to tell what was good and what was not.

- Most Americans don't trust

the food they're being sold

and Heinz's bold attempt to expand his business

ends in disaster.

- H. J. Heinz found his name in the newspaper

not for a budding entrepreneur, but as a criminal.

This really humiliated H. J. Heinz.

- His parents' home got repossessed.

He had to watch his mother cry as they took furniture

and he had been the root cause of this.

It all exploded.

He failed.

- Henry Heinz is ruined

but he's determined to pick himself up and start again

520 miles to the south, in Atlanta, Georgia,

the scars of the Civil War are still raw.

- And tens of thousands of veterans

are dealing with the pain of their injuries.

- Never forget what a horrific experience

that Civil War was for the American people.

It's very difficult to imagine the carnage.

People were suffering.

- Almost all the fighting took place

below the Mason-Dixon Line leaving the South,

and its economy, in ruins.

- The disparity between North and South is huge.

In the South the primary economic driver was agriculture,

and cotton is no longer king.

The war devastates agriculture

and the South's gonna have to reinvent itself.

- In the heart of this unstable environment,

a local entrepreneur struggles to keep his business afloat.

He's a civil war veteran and pharmacist named John Pemberton

- John Pemberton was kind of a creative genius

who is tragic in his own way.

He was never a great businessman.

He would go bankrupt and would start over again.

His signature invention will someday be served

over ten thousand times per second.

- But for now, Pemberton works

late into the night, hoping perfect a formula

that'll help him cash in on the latest craze

sweeping the country, miracle health tonics

called patent medicine.

- Patent medicines were very popular

but also fairly adulterated.

The claims of any particular product were outlandish,

claiming to cure everything from tuberculosis to cancer,

to itchy scalp, you know, all on the same product.

- They contain all sorts of toxic chemicals

and substances that you wouldn't even

wash your floor with it, let alone take it or ingest it.

- John Pemberton's war wounds

have left him addicted to morphine.

Hoping to create a safer alternative,

he gambles on a plant extract from South America.

For thousands of years, Natives have chewed its leaves,

as part of religious rituals and as a powerful stimulant.

It's called the coca leaf.

The same thing used to make cocaine.

- Cocaine was supposed to be this wonder drug

and nobody recognized its potential harm

or addictive quality.

A wine infused with coca leaf

was wildly successful internationally,

in the 1860s, 70s and 80s.

Everybody drank this stuff,

it was supposed to be a cure-all.

It even had endorsements from three different popes,

including Pope Leo the 13th.

- Pemberton hasn't yet perfected

the formula that will someday launch an American empire.

Far from major cities like Pittsburgh and Atlanta,

in a small town of just 7,000 people

there's an institution designed to treat mental

and physical pain in a much different way.

It's called the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

One, there you are.

Two.

Three.

- It's run by a renowned doctor

and medical innovator named John Kellogg

- Everyone follow me.

Arms out, down.

Lower, lower.

Hold and up.

Well done.

- People came from all around the world

to the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

Amelia Earhart,

Thomas Edison,

Henry Ford,

they came to Battle Creek to get well

but they also came to see Dr. John Harvey Kellogg,

who was world famous.

He was one of the most famous physicians of his day.

- Everything okay, sir?

- People followed the doctor long distance

through his magazine Good Health

or his many, many books or his lectures.

Dr. Kellogg's prescriptions and ideas about medicine

were very much out of the norm of his colleagues.

- Dr. Kellogg holds a degree from the prestigious

Bellevue Medical School in New York.

But some of his methods are unorthodox.

- He famously supported sexual abstinence.

He never consummated his 40-year marriage with his wife.

Winter or summer he would work out in a thong.

- The Battle Creek Sanitarium was a crazy place!

Some of the things that went on were wacko.

- Treatments include experimental therapies

like hot air baths, slapping machines, foot vibration

and daily yogurt enemas.

- He invented the first exercise tape if you will.

They were on 78-rpm records

and he had a brass band behind him

and he would give instructions for people at home

to exercise the Kellogg way.

So, he was a very, very inventive guy.

And he had the idea that for the sick stomach,

you had to make food more easily digestible.

- Now, Dr. Kellogg is working

on a totally new medicine that he believes

will prevent nervous disorders, tooth decay, even cancer.

But in the end it won't cure disease,

it'll launch a 37 billion dollar industry.

And tear his family apart

By the 1880s Americans are flooding into cities

in unprecedented numbers,

and eating local food from butchers,

or what's sold in bulk by clerks at general stores.

Food is often preserved with dangerous chemicals

like formaldehyde or borax.

- There was a high incidence of stomach cancer

in the turn of the century that outpaces what we see today.

I think a lot of that was tied to the American diet.

There were all sorts of toxic chemicals

that most Americans consumed.

It's no wonder that every American had a stomachache.

They didn't eat well.

- People are suffering even more

in the Civil War torn South,

turning to miracle health tonics to cure them.

John Pemberton is desperate to cash in on the craze

but he still hasn't perfected his formula.

Already working with the coca leaf,

he adds an exotic seed with medicinal qualities,

called the kola nut.

- If you think about old school pharmacy,

it was all plant based.

Kola nuts originate on the African continent, in Senegal.

It was considered improper for a man

to offer women kola because it was a stimulant,

because it was intoxicating.

- The kola nut is chewed by local tribes

to combat hunger and fatigue

and they're so valuable

some even use them as currency.

Kola extract has a strong, bitter taste.

So, Pemberton experiments with other flavors to temper it.

- He was fine-tuning it and working in nutmeg oils,

lemon oils, lime oils, and coriander.

- He added a great deal of sugar to it

because it was too bitter,

and he added a number of essential oils,

like oil of neroli, oil of cinnamon,

seven different substances,

which eventually were known as the 7X flavor.

- After months of work, his formula is improving.

But Pemberton slides further into his morphine addiction.

Retracing his work, on May 8th, 1886

Pemberton pieces together the formula

and names his new product after its two main ingredients.

- Use this one for now.

We'll have to design something more permanent,

but this will be fine for the meantime.

- He calls it, Coca-Cola.

- John Pemberton was a morphine addict

and he was actually looking for a substitute

but he created that magic secret original recipe

and that was the genesis of Coca-Cola,

which I think, is sort of amazing.

- There are a few brands in the world

that don't require any explanation.

Sort of like those few celebrities

that only need to go by one name.

Coke is certainly one of those brands.

- Pemberton plans to sell his drink

as a health tonic at nearby soda fountains.

Hoping his cocaine based concoction

will catch on locally.

Little does he know it'll become a global phenomenon.

And someone else will take the credit.

At the Battle Creek Sanitarium,

self-made man Dr. John Kellogg's unorthodox treatment

have made him one of the most famous physicians of his day

but one innovation from the sanitarium kitchens

will soon turn him into a household name.

- The chief complaint of people coming to the sanitarium

was some type of stomach or gastrointestinal problem

and so he had the notion that eating meat

was dangerous to your health,

and that a grain and vegetable diet was far better.

- Served as medicinal food,

the product is made of flour, oatmeal

and cornmeal baked into brittle cakes

then smashed into granules.

It's unlike anything most Americans have ever seen.

He calls it granola.

- John Harvey Kellogg considered his food invention

to be preventive medicine.

He didn't add sugar because he thought

too much sugar consumption was bad for you.

But granola was new and exciting and people loved it.

- Kellogg's products will someday be eaten

by 350 million people each morning,

completely redefining the American breakfast

- Breakfast wasn't a particul

identifiable meal in those days.

It didn't have foods all that much associated with it.

Often it was leftovers from the night before.

You couldn't say "That's what people eat for breakfast."

- In some cases, breakfast was really just a luxury

that middle-class or upper-class people ate.

It was very, very time consuming.

In many cases, it was women who woke up early,

spent hours and hours and hours

before the family arose preparing breakfast

- It was a major effort and took a ton of time.

It became a huge undertaking,

just the simple meal of breakfast cereal

was something that could be served hot or cold.

And would take a very short amount of time to consume.

- That one's a little overcooked,

but we'll still use it.

- To help with day to day tasks,

- Which one is this from?

- John works his assistant hard,

a former employee at a broom factory.

It's his younger brother William.

- Even as a young boy, John was brilliant.

He is the golden child.

His brother Will was nearsighted

but people thought he was dim-witted

because he sat in the back of the room and he couldn't see.

And his parents didn't want to put a lot of investment

in his education 'cause they thought,

well, he's not worth it.

- Will oversees bookkeeping,

staffing, maintenance,

and preparation and service of John's granola.

- Granola was designed to be just eaten as is

but William was the one who thought

of putting milk on their products,

and that's sort of when it really becomes more popular.

But William was really lost in his older brother's shadow.

- I'm giving a talk on Saturday.

Abstinence and physical health this time.

- Dr. Kellogg was such an unpleasant, curmudgeonly,

kind of a lousy big brother.

- Are you getting all of this?

- Yeah yeah, I think I got it.

- You know, he used to make W. K. take dictation

while he was using the toilet.

- You know, it would be a lot easier

if I could just wait until you're out.

- So W. K. had this desire to get out

from his brother's shadow.

- John, John.

I'm listening.

- We should sell the cereal.

Market it to every man, woman and child.

- No, it's part of a carefully controlled regimen.

- You're helping every single patient

who comes through the doors.

But we could help more people and make a killing doing it.

Would you just at least consider?

- No!

And that's the end of it.

- It was Will Kellogg who recognized

there are a lot more healthy people

who want a nutritious, easy to prepare breakfast

than ill people who need an easy to digest breakfast.

And he would say to his brother,

"Look, we're leaving money on the table.

"Money that could help the sanitarium.

"That could help us."

But there was a real risk for John Harvey Kellogg

of marketing cereal as a regular product.

Doctors themselves did not advertise.

That was against medical ethics at that time.

And he had enough problems

with the medical profession of being accepted.

He thought that if he sold this product to the mass market

that would be a red flag to the medical profession.

So, he was very careful about that.

- Will knows they're sitting on a cash cow,

but under John's thumb he can't act on it, yet.

In Pittsburgh, fledgling entrepreneur Henry Heinz's

ambition to expand beyond local markets

has left him bankrupt.

- So, how are Sarah and the kids?

- It hasn't been easy.

Thank you for dinner.

- That's what family's for.

- But he has the relentless ambition

to build a new company and risk it all again,

he just needs the right product.

- During Heinz's day, not all the meat

was ready for human consumption.

Some of it had a pretty strong smell and people would say,

"We've got to eat it, it's expensive."

- Will you pass the catsup please?

- To mask the taste and smell of tainted meat

people use a variation on fish sauce used in china

for thousands of years.

- John?

- Yes, please.

- It's called catsup.

- Walnut and mushroom's all they had at the store.

- The catsup really helps.

- In the Americas ketchup was made out of celery

or nuts like walnuts.

This lumpy gray product that had saw dust in it

and all kinds of artificial preservatives

and things that could harm you.

- Heinz realizes that if he can create

a new product that people actually trust,

there's no one in America who won't want to buy it.

And his dream of creating the first mass produced

national food product is reborn.

At the end of the 19th century people are moving

to industrialized cities in record numbers

and safe, reliable food is suddenly scarce.

- You have to remember you're not self-shopping.

There's no supermarket.

You went to a store and you encountered a clerk.

And you told the clerk what you wanted,

and they offered a lot of kind of iffy food.

Food is literally dangerous to your physical wellbeing

during this period.

- The Industrial Revolution has opened the door

to all kinds of daring entrepreneurs.

And Henry Heinz still has a dream

of being the first to mass produce a food product

that will appeal to every American,

and be sold in every corner of the nation.

Even though his first attempt drove him bankrupt

less than a year ago.

- In earlier times, business failure

was seen as a sign of moral failure.

There was something wrong with you if your business failed.

But by the period of the Industrial Revolution

this attitude was changing.

For every John D. Rockefeller there were a hundred

would be John D. Rockefellers.

There was much more willingness to take risks.

Along with risks comes the possibility of failure.

- Along with his brother, John,

he takes his last shot

in a makeshift test kitchen in his own home.

Draining his family's savings, desperate to create a safe,

reliable version of a product

the world knows today as tomato ketchup.

- After the bankruptcy, Heinz was determined

to restore his reputation.

He knew that people didn't have the time

to make labor-intensive sauces and preserves.

And so that's what he focused on.

Yeah there was walnut ketchup and there was fish sauce,

there was celery ketchup but tomato ketchup,

that's something that he believed would catch on.

This was pioneering.

This was a big idea.

- Heinz needs his ketchup

to appeal to as many people as possible.

- Hey John, try this.

- And he struggles to get the taste right.

- What do you think?

- Heinz adds salt, onion and garlic

to his tomato base, thickening it with pulp.

Then, he experiments with a natural,

but highly acidic preservative,

vinegar and sugar to balance out the sour flavor.

- John, taste this.

- Not bad.

Well, that's not bad at all.

Good God, it might be it.

- Heinz created this magical concoction

of umami and sweetness and acidity,

sour, tart, all in one.

And it goes with everything.

- Well done, well done.

- Heinz has just invented

a groundbreaking new product but now he has a new problem.

He has to get people to trust it.

At the time, most packaged food products quickly go rancid

or are full of harmful ingredients

so they're often hidden from view.

- In those days, producers would put their products

in barrels or stoneware.

Sometimes they'd use brown glass or green glass bottles.

You couldn't see what was inside the package.

But he knew that if people could see

the purity of his ketchup, they'd buy it.

- In a stroke of brilliance,

Heinz packages his ketchup in clear glass bottles,

one of the first entrepreneurs to let consumers

see his product before they buy it

and the most iconic condiment in the world is born.

- This is the guy who made the greatest ketchup,

that bottle that I see everywhere.

That's a piece of America.

To say Henry Heinz was ahead of his time

is an understatement.

- Henry Heinz was a pioneer in every sense of the word.

In understanding that if you could deliver a product

that had the confidence of the consumer,

you'd really be able create new markets

and new demand for those products

in ways that were unimaginable before.

- Now Heinz has a choice,

play it safe and sell his ketchup locally

or gamble everything on the same strategy of expansion

that drove his last company out of business.

- Alright, this one's all set.

Keep tasting.

Doesn't matter how much you make if it doesn't taste good.

Remember, John takes random samples of every product.

- Meanwhile, Will Kellogg knows

that he and his brother are sitting on a potential goldmine,

and it's about to be exposed to an unexpected threat.

- One, two, three.

One, two, three.

Keep your knees level.

- The Battle Creek Sanitarium has a new patient.

- Head up as you go down.

- A man with a history of business failures

and years of ill health, his name is C. W. Post.

- Charlie Post failed at every business he ever created.

He had what we might call a nervous breakdown.

So, he was a broken man when he came to Battle Creek

to try to regain his health.

But he was too broke to stay at the sanitarium.

- The sanitarium's ground breaking treatments,

including Kellogg's revolutionary granola cereal,

cost as much as $60 a month, more than $2100 today.

So, Post works with Will Kellogg in the sanitarium kitchens,

helping to make the groundbreaking granola,

to earn his keep.

- It was an unknown Trojan horse

letting C. W. Post help cook in the kitchen

- You're a good worker, Mr. Post.

- Thank you, Will.

- Will keeps meticulous records

of every batch of granola,

hoping he can one day convince his brother to sell it

and C. W. Post has a front row seat.

- C. W. Post, being an inventor

and being somebody who loved to tinker,

he was fascinated by Kellogg's cereal.

So naturally he wanted to understand everything

about these health food preparations.

He was just so eager to make his fortune.

- Will's helper is about to become

his most bitter enemy,

igniting a war that will last for two decades.

In the South, health tonics are booming.

Now being marketed as soft drinks,

driven by a growing push against alcohol

called The Temperance Movement.

- You know, the prohibition didn't just hatch.

It really emerged because a lot of American wives

were concerned about the amount of alcohol

their husbands were consuming.

And it was just massive.

- What do you do when you're not going to drink alcohol?

Soda fountains are becoming more and more

and more and more popular.

And people can be social at soda fountains.

- By the late 1800s,

soda fountains are a community staple,

rivaling pubs in popularity,

and they're often located in pharmacies.

But just as Coca-Cola is making its mark,

John Pemberton is suddenly too ill to produce his syrup.

- Coca-Cola was successful locally,

but in the middle of this, Pemberton got sicker.

It turns out he had stomach cancer

and his morphine addiction

had taken a firmer hold than ever.

He needed money.

- In a desperate move,

Pemberton takes out an ad in the local paper,

offering a 50% stake in his business for $2000,

about $50,000 in modern money.

Today, half of the Coca-Cola company

would be worth over 100 billion.

It catches the eye of budding entrepreneurs across the state

including an ambitious rival pharmacist named Asa Candler.

- Asa Candler went to Atlanta

with only a $1.75 in his pocket.

He was constantly on the make looking for a single product

that could make his fortune.

- One minute.

I said one minute.

- Asa Candler, he had tried Coca-Cola

and he thought that it cured his headaches

and that was one reason

he wanted to get ahold of the company.

- You know, a soda fountain up in Alpharetta,

they're selling something that they're calling Coca-Cola.

- Really?

That's funny, I've never been up to Alpharetta.

Unless what you're saying

is my deal with you isn't exclusive.

- Just making conversation.

- It's confusing how many people were involved

in this early chain of title.

Pemberton sold Coca-Cola to a number of different people,

in fact, he'd sold off two-thirds of the company.

- Candler takes his first step

towards untold riches

by buying a piece of Pemberton's Coca-Cola company.

- Best of luck to you.

- But in a new, American industrial age

of ruthless ambition and self made millionaires,

he's not going to stop until he has it all.

Asa Candler owns a piece of the fledgling Coca-Cola brand.

- The Coca-Cola Company, capital T.

- And he immediately buys up

as much of the company as he can

from anyone else who has a stake.

- Candler was a driven hustler,

who was going to succeed no matter what

at something and who wasn't going to stop until he did.

- Coca-Cola's founder, John Pemberton,

still owns a third of the company

and he's the last obstacle in Candler's way.

Across town,

by 1888, Pemberton's family can only watch

as his stomach cancer continues to worsen.

- Candler wanted to get ahold of Coca-Cola

and by the time he wanted to, Pemberton was dying

and had already sold off two-thirds

of The Coca-Cola Company.

- A dying Pemberton has nothing

to leave his wife, Anna Eliza, and his son, Charles,

except the remaining rights to Coca-Cola.

And all the riches they'll someday bring.

By the late 1880s, the United States

is growing exponentially,

and for the first time the nation is linked in a way

that, just decades earlier, was unimaginable.

Thanks to the Transcontinental Railroad.

Now more than 150,000 miles of train track

crisscross the nation, creating a path to one of the biggest

periods of business expansion the country has ever seen,

led by a new breed of pioneer.

Driven by the success of fellow industrialists

like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan.

- Let's go people.

- Who have pushed expansion the of railroads,

- Thank you sir.

- Henry Heinz has a bold dream

to create a mass produced, national product.

- The iron and steel industry could ship its goods by rail.

The modern oil industry would not have developed

without railroads because tanker cars

carried oil products all across the country.

The same was true for any number of manufactured products.

- Okay, let's keep moving.

We gotta get these orders out.

- Before this period, what you ate in the West

and what you ate in the Northeast

and what you ate in the South was probably very different.

The railroad makes the entire United States

a possible market for packaged food.

- To reach every corner of America,

Heinz needs a factory far more efficient

and powerful than anything that exists.

And that means he has to build it himself.

And as usual, he's thinking big.

- It's perfect.

- That's a lot of money.

Why can't we just rent some place bigger?

- Early factories were actually very primitive.

We think about the modern assembly line and moving parts,

but they were often unsafe, very hot, unsanitary spaces

that didn't have a great deal of efficiency.

It was a room full of people working together

performing certain repetitive tasks.

You didn't have automation to speed that process along.

And in this period thinkers coming up with new ways

to do work that will make it more efficient

and more profitable.

- Let's focus on what works

and not get so far ahead of ourselves.

- You're thinking too small.

We build as big as we can

and then we create the demand for more.

- You'll burn through all of our cash flow.

- People like Heinz are not unlike Rockefeller

and JP Morgan, Ford or any of these other titans.

These are huge American industrialists.

They are the American dream.

- That makes me nervous.

It should make you nervous, too.

- It'll pay off, trust me.

- Heinz's vision is to create

a new kind of factory,

one that will change the course of American industry

and he's risking everything to do it.

Hundreds of miles away, another future mogul

is prepared to do anything to succeed.

C.W. Post is leaving the Battle Creek Sanitarium

and he's taking something with him.

The ideas behind Kellogg's cereal.

Taking square aim at making himself

the founding father of the American breakfast.

In a test kitchen hidden in an old barn,

C.W. Post is working on a revolutionary product

that'll single-handedly reshape the American morning,

breakfast cereal.

- For a family living in a big city, life was pretty hard

because both parents had to work,

often children were working to help support the households.

There was not a lot of spare time.

Fast, quick, easy foods were something

that people were looking for.

- Cereal is promised as bam,

here you can have breakfast in a bowl, just adding milk.

And you have people kind of rethinking what breakfast is.

A total invention, right?

I mean, there's no reason why cereal

should be for breakfast.

It was just invented by American food makers.

- Cereal is quick to make, shelf stable

and a stolen idea.

- For C. W. Post to see what the Kellogg brothers are up to,

then take it back when he leaves and form his own cereal,

I mean, some would call it thievery,

others would call it smart American ingenuity and business.

- To perfect it, Post is adding an ingredient

the man he took it from. Dr. John Kellogg, never would.

- He added in sugar.

So suddenly, it was sweet, it was crunchy,

all of the things that all of the traditional

sanitarium food wasn't.

- He calls his new product

Grape-Nuts.

- It was called Grape-Nuts

because they were using grape sugar

and the sort of nuttiness of the crunchy consistency.

And then, he really began marketing it everywhere.

- I need you to fill this one up.

- Yeah.

- It's the beginning of an American empire

and the opening salvo in what will soon become

a bitter fight with the Kelloggs.

As American industry continues to expand,

a much larger market is starting to emerge.

By the end of the 19th century,

the Transcontinental Railroad creates

an unprecedented means of distribution.

- If you are producing something in Pittsburgh

and you wanted to sell it in New York,

before railroads, typically what you would do,

was ship it all the way down the Ohio river,

down the Mississippi, through the Gulf of Mexico

and up the Atlantic Coast to New York.

Railroads allowed you to move things swiftly

and inexpensively.

- New opportunities create the possibility

of untold wealth for those bold enough to claim it.

Leading a new wave of American entrepreneurship,

Henry Heinz is determined to cash in,

investing all his profits into a sprawling

17 building complex

with direct access to all major rail lines.

But his boldest gambit yet is his plan to infuse it

with a new technology that has yet to be fully harnessed.

In the 1890s, factories are powered by coal,

and lit by candles or kerosene lamps.

In 1893, George Westinghouse lights the Chicago World's Fair

with a new technology that is still virtually unknown

to most Americans.

It's electricity.

And Heinz wants it, at all costs.

- It's a lot of money to spend on technology

that may not even, may not even be around in a few years.

- We're wiring this factory starting today.

If this is the future, I need it.

- Heinz is determined to become the first

to power his entire factory using electricity

years before any other major industrialist.

- There were some people who thought that electricity

was uncomfortably close to magic

because things would happen invisibly.

They couldn't see the forces at work.

And, of course, if you touch it

and got electrocuted that made everything

more like black magic.

In fact, electricity was far safer than kerosene lanterns

or candles or anything like that.

- If he can pull it off,

he'll be ushering in a new era of American industry,

but he's already failed once

and this is his last shot.

- The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not want.

- Hundreds of miles away,

John Pemberton's battle with stomach cancer is over.

On August 16th, 1888, the inventor of Coca-Cola

is laid to rest.

- No one really thinks about Doc Pemberton.

I don't think anybody even knows who Doc Pemberton is.

And it is so sad because this man really created the recipe,

tried his whole life to come up with this formula,

and he never really saw what it was going to become.

- The Coca-Cola brand

is more vulnerable than ever

and Asa Candler sees the opportunity to strike.

- Mrs. Pemberton, my name is Asa Candler.

I was a business associate of your late husband.

- Is there something I can help you with?

I don't believe we've met.

I'm Charles, John's son.

- I'm sorry, listen I can help you.

Your father left expenses behind.

You have a family to look after.

Look, I can pay you in cash.

- Pay me for what?

- I'll give you $300, right now, today,

for the rights to Coca-Cola.

- 300 for me, and another 300 for my mother.

- Then it's a deal.

- Asa Candler was determined to get hold of Coca-Cola,

and he did it by hook or by crook.

Supposedly, he approached Pemberton's widow at his funeral

and persuaded her to sell him the brand

for a very small amount of money.

So, it was really quite, quite an amazing story.

- In an era before products are sold nationally,

Asa Candler is determined to dominate Atlanta

like Pemberton never could,

not yet realizing that he'll someday dominate the globe.

- America is approaching

the turn of the 20th century,

and a new breed of ambitious self-made man

is leading a technological revolution.

Yet the world has almost no factories with all lights

and machinery completely powered by electricity,

until now.

In 1898, after 8 costly years of construction,

Henry Heinz's fully-electrified factory

is finally about to be powered on for the very first time.

Outpacing Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan's US Steel

by nearly a decade.

- One way to understand how committed H. J. Heinz was

to being an innovator is that he was willing to take a leap

into the future and bring in electricity

at a time when people were still scared.

I mean, even the president of the United States

was scared to turn on the light switch

when the white house was electrified.

- With a flip of a switch,

Henry Heinz has kickstarted an era of industrial progress

the likes of which the world has never seen before.

- The fact that Heinz said bring this in.

It's the wave of the future.

It's just amazing.

That was a big step forward.

Electricity allows Heinz

to fully realize his next,

and perhaps most important innovation,

the continuous flow system.

Known today as the assembly line.

Heinz pioneers a system where an electric ceiling crane

and trolley brings ingredients to a series of chutes

and conveyors that move products through his factory,

allowing workers to perform one simple task

over and over again

- If you're making lots of one thing,

if you can make that absolutely identically

then you can make it at a lower cost.

If the individual workers can get more competent,

can get faster at the production process

you could make their work more efficient.

This is the first step toward mass production.

- The continuous flow system

is decades ahead of its time,

and it will go on to inspire innovations in other industries

that will change every aspect of American life.

- Before Henry Ford had an assembly line for his Model T's,

H.J. Heinz had an assembly line for food.

He was a pioneer.

- Really what you have here is Ford learning from

and adopting the technology, that had been applied earlier.

Heinz was a genius among geniuses

when it came to automation.

- Increased factory output

helps fuel the creation of a national market.

- If there's a single secret to America's rise

to the position of world dominance economically

it was the fact that it had this single market

where by the end of the 19th century

a factory in Pittsburgh,

could produce enough to serve the entire national market.

- Within two years,

Heinz overtakes Carnegie Steel as one of the fastest growing

companies in the country.

And a few short years later he is worth 20 million dollars,

over half a billion today.

But success puts a target squarely on his back.

Other food manufacturers are quick to follow his lead.

By 1899 sales of, C. W. Post's Grape-Nuts skyrocket,

and he invests in a factory

to ship his product coast to coast.

The idea of a national market is still new.

And since state governments usually regulate commerce,

there are no rules in place to oversee it.

- There was no limit on advertising.

And so you have all these products that are promised

to save people from everything,

from indigestion to headaches.

And there's no boundaries on what they can promise.

There was no regulation.

- C. W. Post takes full advantage,

marketing his cereal as a miracle cure.

- He would put out ads that claimed

that they would cure everything

from appendicitis to impotence.

He said anything and everything that could sell a product.

- Soon, copycat brands pop up by the dozen.

Like Post, all of them capitalize

on the Battle Creek Sanitarium's reputation,

many of them making outrageous claims.

- You know, when you patent a food product,

if you're stealing that idea

and you change one part of that recipe

you're not infringing on the patent.

By the turn of the century,

there were more than a hundred different

cereal companies in Battle Creek.

- Will Kellogg is desperate to enter the fight

to compete with imitators

but his older brother, John, still stands in his way.

- Look, another one.

They're all making money hand over fist,

and none are even half as big as Post.

- If you have a point, make it.

- Give me one good reason why we shouldn't

be making stacks of money off this.

I'll do everything.

I'll oversee everything.

You won't have to lift a finger.

- You're not capable!

The only reason you work here is because you're my brother.

So don't come whining to me

if you're unhappy with your job.

- The doctor was really designing theirs products

for their patients, not for the mass market.

The Battle Creek Sanitarium was John Harvey Kellogg's baby

and he protected it fiercely.

And that drove Will Kellogg quite mad.

- Then a simple mistake changes everything

- Good morning.

- Did you mean to leave that out last night?

- Shoot.

Help me roll this out.

- To try and salvage a batch

of wheat cereal dough left out overnight,

Will decides to roll it out anyway.

The result is a flake.

- Well that's a first.

- This creation was an accident, an accident!

- It'll someday generate over 13 billion dollars

in revenue per year.

And it's a brand new weapon in the fight against Post.

Will Kellogg has spent years watching food titans

like C. W. Post make a killing.

Now, he's stumbled on a new weapon

he can use against his rival,

the cereal flake.

- Well, that's a first.

- This creation was an accident, an accident!

You stop and you think, what if they just disposed of it?

What if they didn't force their way through the crank?

And the thing that I think is so fantastic,

is you never know where

that moment of inspiration is gonna strike.

- To produce flakes, dough is boiled,

left out to ferment for several hours,

and then compressed through rollers into thin sheets.

Those sheets are baked,

and naturally flake off when scraped.

- Flake cereal was very popular.

It was remarkably welcomed

by people who ate at the sanitarium.

It was a eureka-like moment.

- The first flakes are made with wheat,

but Will begins experimenting with other grains

until the first Kellogg's corn flake is born.

- Will Kellogg hated Charlie Post for stealing his ideas

and he knew he had a better product than Grape-Nuts.

He could see in the dining room

how much people enjoyed eating flake cereal.

He kept track of people who wronged him

and he would strike back.

- Will Kellogg has watched Post make millions

selling ideas he stole from the sanitarium.

He may finally have a cereal that can put Post in his place,

if he can bring it to market.

In Atlanta, Asa Candler dreams of owning

the first national soft drink.

He ramps up production on Coca-Cola

using a clever strategy to expand quickly and cheaply,

an early form of franchising.

- These need to be on the first shipment

out tomorrow morning.

Do you hear me?

- Yes, sir.

- Candler sells his syrup

to independent distributors across the country

who mix and bottle it in their own factories,

spreading Coca-Cola at no cost to Candler.

Soon, coke is so popular Candler opens syrup factories

in Dallas, Chicago, Baltimore and Los Angeles.

- This is going to be great.

You know I haven't been to Texas since I was a kid.

I hear Dallas is a real jewel.

- Certainly is.

- Should we sit down in let's say two weeks?

- Sounds good.

- Looking forward to it.

- All right.

- Coke is a company way ahead of its time.

It's a company that basically is lean

from the very beginning, doesn't have a lot of factories,

doesn't have a lot of fixed costs to it.

And once it sort of reaches out across the South

as a regional product,

it quickly becomes a national product.

- Candler also tweaks the recipe,

removing one of John Pemberton's key ingredients.

- Asa Candler very quietly hired a chemical company

to decocainize it in 1903.

And since then virtually no cocaine

has been in Coca-Cola since 1903.

It still does contain decocainized

coca leaf extracts, to this day.

Coca-Cola is the source of legal importation

of whole coca leaf, the only legal importation

of whole coca leaf into this country.

By 1901 Coca-Cola's distributors

produce over 500,000 barrels a year,

bringing in a million dollars in revenue,

more than thirty million today.

By 1905, the Heinz Company profits top 11 million,

more than 300 million today.

But Heinz has a problem.

- Let's go, gentlemen, let's go.

Move it.

There we go.

Careful, gentlemen, careful.

I know it's heavy but let's be careful.

- Now, competitors are multiplying,

not only stealing his ideas but undercutting his product

by using cheap, dangerous fillers

and there's no law against it.

- This is really sort of the wild west of food laws

because there was almost no regulation whatsoever.

You could say that your food was pure

and sanitary and it wasn't.

So the cleanliness and additives of food

are really being called into question on a national scale.

- His competitors tried to undercut him

by providing food with fillers and preservatives.

He always kept an eye on the bottom line

and he knew that he had to fight them.

- Other producers were using the same kind of glass bottles

that he was using so he bought

all the glass bottles in Pittsburgh.

He used what he could,

everything else he put on a barge,

shoved it out into the Allegheny river and sank it.

He literally sank the competition.

Nobody else had any jars or bottles to put their product in.

- Heinz can't fight imitators in every market

so he devises another shrewd plan to strike back.

He'll outwit his foes

by using the new movement called Progressivism.

- The Progressive Era is a moment in American history

where reformers start to take

a critical look at American society

in the hopes of going after all the social ills

that are undermining its republican values.

One of the politicians to benefit from this

is Teddy Roosevelt, who had come from New York

and really built a political career as a Progressive,

positioning himself as someone who is concerned

about these types of reforms.

- In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt

rides a Progressive wave to a second term in office,

selling himself as an enemy of big business monopolies

and a champion of worker's rights

and increased federal regulations.

- Send this to Dr. Harvey Willey,

Federal Bureau of Chemistry.

That's all for now, thank you.

- Almost 30 years after he created

a new ketchup to combat the taste of spoiled meat,

Heinz plans to lobby for new food safety regulations

that will turn his competitors into criminals.

- Is that the last barrel for the Philadelphia shipment?

Excellent.

- In the process, he'll also pressure test

his 28 year old son Howard, a recent Yale grad,

with a chemistry degree.

- Good to see you, Father.

- Good to see you!

Come on in side.

There are things I would like to show you.

- Since he was a child,

Howard has been groomed to take over his father's company.

Now, he must prove he's ready.

- I have a job for you that I wanted to discuss in person.

I need you to go to D. C.

and fight for the future of this company.

- I'm ready.

- Heinz sends his son to address

the government commission on food safety

convened by President Roosevelt,

his task, use the commission to hobble his enemies.

- I wouldn't ask you to do this if I didn't believe in you.

Don't let me down.

- By 1905 packaged foods

are an established part of American life,

with brands like HEINZ, Post and Coca-Cola leading the way.

But the food industry has grown so big, so fast,

that there's no regulation in place to protect consumers

from false advertising and harmful additives.

- For most Americans in the 19th century,

there was generally a belief

that the things that occurred in daily life

were best dealt with by states and local governments.

Food production companies that were producing

for a national market,

whose operations spanned across several states

they were beyond the control of any state.

It hadn't occurred to them that they needed

the federal government to step in

and improve their daily lives.

- But Henry Heinz sees a competitive advantage

in the federal regulation of food

and sends his son Howard to Washington to lobby for it.

- I'm told you're a whiskey man.

Both of these glasses contain whiskey

you can find on the shelves of any liquor store.

One is pure, top-shelf bourbon.

The other is cut with methanol,

the main ingredient in formaldehyde.

The question is,

can you tell the difference?

Take your time, swirl them around, smell them,

do whatever you'd like.

- That's the pure whiskey.

- Sure enough to drink it?

- Okay, you've made your point.

- The truth is people are forced

to make this decision every day.

Only they don't know they're making it.

- I'll take it to the president.

- Thank you, sir.

- Thanks in large part to Heinz's efforts,

President Theodore Roosevelt throws his support

behind the initiative.

- We trust the companies that give us our food

without knowing very much at all

about how they're getting it to us.

We trust them implicitly.

Sometimes I think too much, because we don't question.

Most of us don't even read the labels.

- On June 23rd, 1906,

the Pure Food and Drug Act is passed.

- The Food and Drug Act includes laws of purity

and quality and consistency

and what can be included in what you're selling

and that you can't adulterate.

And also advertising regulation.

You have to actually be able to back up your claims

of what your food or product can do.

- The legislation paves the way

for the future Food and Drug Administration, or FDA.

And it makes many of products in competition with Heinz

illegal almost immediately.

- Heinz's competitors lobbied against

the 1906 Food and Drug Act.

They didn't want to see the act pass.

They fought hard.

Heinz fought harder

and Howard became the representative

for the company around the world.

- By 1910 Henry Heniz

is one of the richest men in America,

a true titan of industry.

He has created the product that defines ketchup

and revolutionized the industrial process.

When this visionary dies in 1919,

his company employs more than 9000 people

and earns the present day equivalent

of 200 million dollars.

Today, the company he began in his family's kitchen

is part of a conglomerate

topping 26 billion dollars in sales.

- H. J. Heinz was an innovator.

He built trust in the American public

that you'll get what you pay for.

Today, Kraft Heinz produces more than a billion

bottles of ketchup a year.

They produce enough self-serve packets

for every man, woman, and child on the planet

to have two of them.

You could literally slide to the moon

and back on HEINZ Ketchup packets.

- You could throw any other bottle of ketchup on the table,

but if it's not HEINZ Ketchu, I'm going to think twice.

But there was plenty of failure before there was success.

Henry Heinz went bankrupt and lost everything,

and a lot of people would have given up.

But if you have that sort of perseverance

and you know you've got that personality

to carry something through,

it could lead to, I mean, ridiculous success.

- At the Battle Creek Sanitarium,

Will Kellogg has watched from the sidelines

as the national cereal market makes C. W. Post a millionaire.

Then in the middle of the night,

the sanitarium bursts into flame.

For John Kellogg, it's a personal tragedy.

For Will,

it's the business opportunity he's been waiting for.

At the sanitarium that Dr. John Kellogg

has spent his entire career building,

a furnace located in one of the sanitarium's bathrooms

overheats, sending the building up in flames.

Leaving one patient dead

and John's life work in ruins.

- The Battle Creek Sanitarium was this grand complex

with beautiful rooms and all sorts of facilities,

but like many buildings that were built in the 19th century,

had a brick veneer but was mostly made of timber.

And the place burned down in a matter of hours

to mere rubble.

His baby, his creation had burned to the ground.

- Repairs will cost a million dollars,

some 30 million today

and while John Kellogg sees disaster,

Will sees an opportunity to wrestle Corn Flakes

from his brother's control.

- How you holding up?

- I'll manage.

We'll rebuild.

It'll just take some time.

- Here.

- What's this?

- It's plenty, enough to get construction started.

- I know, but--

- It's not a gift.

I want to buy the recipes, our recipes.

- Where'd you get this kind of money?

- Private investors, mostly former patients.

I'm going to take the recipes and start a new company.

I've already leased a factory space.

- Are you sure you want to do this?

- I'm positive.

- Will was ready to get out,

so he raised money from relatives and took out loans

and it was very hard to get loans

and he found one banker who had faith in him.

It was about a hundred thousand dollars,

which was more than a million dollars, back then.

- I'll take your money, Will and you can have the recipes.

You'll be out of business in a year.

You don't even have a high school education.

What makes you think you can run a successful business?

- I've been running this place for years, John.

You're a brilliant doctor but you don't know everything.

- Goodbye, William.

- I'll see you around, John.

- With the recipes in hand,

will sets out to cash in on the Kellogg name

and bring his Corn Flakes to the world.

Across the country, the Pure Food and Drug Act

is starting to take effect.

Authorities are cracking down on false labeling,

harmful ingredients and outlandish health claims.

And in 1909, officials set their sights

on one of the most closely guarded

secret formulas in the nation.

- Everyone stay calm, this is a federal seizure.

Stay where you are and follow instructions.

- The federal government claimed,

with some justification,

that Coca-Cola was mislabeled

because ironically, it no longer had cocaine in it.

So you can't call it Coca-Cola.

And it had a deleterious added product, which was caffeine.

And so they grabbed 40 barrels and 20 kegs

and mounted this huge lawsuit against them.

- On March 13th, 1911,

the government sues Coca-Cola to force them

to remove caffeine from their formula,

insisting that it's harmful to children

- It was quite an amusing lawsuit in many ways

because, some of the experts claim that Coca-Cola

hardened the heart so that it didn't beat anymore,

they said that it killed rabbits and frogs,

but that was because they had them breathe it in.

- Asa Candler is determined to fight back,

and the case ascends all the way to the Supreme Court.

- The federal government has sued Coca-Cola

over the amount of caffeine in their secret formula.

The case has lasted five long years.

Finally Asa Candler volunteers to reduce it.

- As a result of that lawsuit Coca-Cola agreed

to cut the amount of caffeine in half

and Coca-Cola stopped using children

in their ads forever more.

So they didn't show anyone under 12

actually drinking the beverage.

- Despite all his struggles, Asa Candler

has turned John Pemberton's obscure miracle tonic

into one of the most recognizable name brands

in the country.

And Candler doesn't want to share the credit

with anyone else.

- Asa Candler burned early

company records quite deliberately

and I'm convinced he did so

because he didn't want anybody to see them.

There may have been some skullduggery there

but it's not a part of any official history.

- The mad genius of John Pemberton

brought Coca-Cola into existence

but it was Asa Candler who used raw ambition,

shrewd marketing, and national infrastructure

to turn it into an icon.

- Without each other,

we wouldn't know who they were today.

You need to have the inventor.

You need to have the person who can develop the product

that no one else has seen before

and can really change the game.

But, you need to have the advertising and marketing

and business savvy in order to be this successful.

You look at how much the world has changed in the last

10, 20, 50, 100 years, yet we're still drinking Coke.

That's a piece of Americana that's in you.

- Asa Candler goes on to become

the richest man in Atlanta, even serving as mayor.

The company he created will go on to astonishing success,

employing over 60,000 people in some 200 countries,

becoming one of the most recognized brands in the world.

- For me Coke is a staple in, in everything that's American,

and I've traveled the world and anywhere you go, it's Coke.

- Just months after buying

cereal recipes from his brother,

Will Kellogg's factory is up and running.

- You guys take a break in about 30 minutes, okay?

- And for the first time Kellogg's

iconic Corn Flakes hit the mass market.

- Yes.

Very good, very good.

- In his first year, he manufactures 25,000 cases

per month thanks to his proprietary industrial rollers.

- Will Kellogg developed a way

of rolling out dough very thin.

He worked with a Detroit based company.

They made steel rollers mostly for the tobacco industry

and it was a way of flattening the tobacco leaves

before they were crushed up

and then made into on cigarettes.

Will gave them specifications that he needed

to make his cereal on a grand scale

and they designed the first rollers.

- Will's flake rollers use a revolutionary

water cooling system which prevents the dough from burning

and sticking to the metal rollers,

which produces crisp flakes with no waste.

- He added a little bit of malt

and a little bit of salt to make it taste better.

And then he put his name on the cereal box,

so it became Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

Now, Will says it was because

"I wanted to put my moniker on it.

"I wanted to tell my customers that I endorse this product."

But he had to know that the name Kellogg

was very very marketable because of the doctor.

But Will Kellogg was off to the races

and he never looked back.

- With state of the art equipment

and his famous last names scrawled across every box,

Will is finally ready to go to war with C. W. Post.

On the next episode of The Food That Built America.

A small time candy maker,

named Milton Hershey hits on a big idea.

- I don't care how they do it in Europe.

I'm using fresh milk.

- That'll build an American empire.

- It's chaos out there.

- And a father and son duo

named Frank and Forrest Mars forge a dynasty

that'll rival Hershey and tear their family apart.

- Help, help

- An outdoorsman named Clarence Birdseye,

joins forces with with cereal empire scion Marjorie Post.

- I'm not interested in owning three quarters of anything.

- To introduce the nation to frozen food.

- How much for the rest?

- Ruthless tactics lead to an all out cereal war.

- I'm gonna bury you.

- A gun slinging Kentucky businessman

rises from a gas station kitchen,

- I made you a promise, remember what I said?

- to become an American icon.

And the McDonald brothers turn the restaurant kitchen

into an assembly line.

- Okay those are done, those are done!

Flip 'em, let's go!

- But it's Ray Kroc who will turn their invention

into the biggest chain in the world.

- The American people never forget the name McDonald's.