SO...JUST WHAT IS A GRAPE NUT?

(This article appeared in the June 1, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal)

No Grapes, No Nuts, No Market Share: A Venerable Cereal Faces Crunchtime
A New Identity as Breakfast's 'Father Figure'; Where Have You Gone, Euell Gibbons?
By BARRY NEWMAN
CERES, Calif. -- All the world's Grape Nuts come from a dirty-white, six-story concrete building with steam rising out of the roof here in the San Joaquin Valley. The valley grows lots of grapes and lots of nuts, so the factory's location would make sense, if Grape Nuts contained any local ingredients. Which it doesn't. For 111 years, over breakfast, Americans have wondered: What's a grape nut? A grape nut looks like a kidney stone, but the name, unlike shredded wheat's, isn't self-descriptive. This raises many reasonable questions: Is it grapes that haven't developed? What part of the grape do they use? For those who have read the box and learned what Grape Nuts are made of (flour), a denser issue arises: How does a cereal with the mouthfeel of gravel get manufactured? Fernando Vargas Teaser: On the factory's fourth floor, all day every day, objects with the proportions of hewn firewood and the heft of cinder blocks hurtle along a conveyor, dive into a steel chute, disappear down a black hole -- and emit what sounds like a startled scream. All the while, Fernando Vargas, who has operated the Grape Nuts machine for 32 years, stands next to the chute in a hard hat yelling, "Dropping the bombs! Dropping the bombs!" When soaked in milk, the final product is mildly sweet brown stuff. But if Grape Nuts lovers don't know what the stuff is, Grape Nuts sellers have no doubts. Carin Gendell, who was its senior brand manager in the 1980s, remembers how her staff described it. "Grape Nuts," she says, "was people eating advertising." Since people haven't been eating nearly as much of it as they used to, the latest Grape Nuts ad campaign, running now on MSN's Web site, is trying a new tonic: It consists of skits in which male milquetoasts get droll advice on "looking cool while driving a minivan," or "letting your in-laws move into your house." The slogan -- "That takes Grape Nuts" -- implies that the stuff enhances virility. C.W Post might have written it himself. The founder of Postum Cereals not only cooked up Grape Nuts in Battle Creek, Mich., around 1898, but also concocted some of the earliest mass advertising to peddle it. A 1910 ad said Grape Nuts had "phosphate of potash" for building "brain and nerves." It didn't. Another said the Panama Canal couldn't have been dug without Grape Nuts because it "keeps almost indefinitely in any climate." Other ads claimed it prevented malaria and appendicitis. It doesn't. By 1914, when Mr. Post apparently killed himself -- shortly after an appendicitis attack -- Grape Nuts had cut its curative claims to one: constipation. Yet the ads kept coming: In the '60s, a boy grabs a woman in a swimming pool; she's his girlfriend's mom. "Oh, no, Mrs. Burke!" he exclaims. "I thought you were Dale!" In the '70s, woodsman Euell Gibbons asks, "Ever eat a pine tree?" If Grape Nuts were wood chips, nobody minded -- the stuff was the seventh-biggest cold cereal in the land. But Mr. Gibbons died and the land became less earthy. Sales slid and never regained ground. Grape Nuts wandered in the wilderness as the Post operation passed from General Foods to Phillip Morris to Kraft -- and wound up in 2008 as a division of Ralcorp, a maker of knockoff store brands. Cereals containing sugary objects like "Honey Bunches" dominated Post's line. In 2005, four Grape Nuts ovens in Battle Creek were scrapped, leaving just the one here in California. With a share of the cereal market below 1%, the stuff was tilting toward crunchtime. "We need to bring it back to life in a relevant way," says Kelley Peters, the "insights" director who charts Grape Nuts psychographics for Ralcorp's $5 million resuscitation attempt. Her target: men 45 years old and up. "Men aspire to it," she says. "It's strong and stern, the father figure of cereals." Her marketing chief, Jennifer Marchant, points out: "It tends to break your teeth sometimes." True, but Grape Nuts loyalists don't all welcome the focus on maleness. Sylvie Dale, 38, an editor in New Jersey, and a woman, says: "The rhythmic crunching that reverberates around your skull could be ambient sound meditation. To have the patience to get through a bowl, you have to practice mindfulness." Ms. Dale adds: "I have a special place in my heart for this cereal." David Smith does, too, though he says, "I don't want Grape Nuts and testosterone in the same sentence, ever." As a teenager, he biked cross-country, eating the stuff out of a saddle bag. At 52, he sells flooring an hour's drive from Battle Creek. His devotion to Grape Nuts remains constant. "It's a cereal that doesn't require much from me," he says. "I guess it isn't a real relationship." When Ms. Peters conducted psychological interviews for the ad campaign, she was sometimes asked how Grape Nuts are made. "I asked back," she says, "how do you think they're made?" Mr. Smith's guess: "Wheat, barley and nuclear fusion." Fission is more like it. On a hot day in the valley, a fruity scent hung over the Post plant. It was Apple Caramel Pecan Crunch, which is made here, too. The Grape Nuts ingredients stood in silos outside: wheat (red and white) and barley, wet and malting. Maltose is the only sugar in Grape Nuts. Mr. Post may have called it grape sugar, or thought Grape Nuts looked like grape seeds, or that grape seeds looked like nuts, or that malted barley tasted nutty. Nobody seems to know. The grain was tipping into mills that ground it into flour. Until five years ago, the mills spat out the husks for cattle feed. Now they stay in, so Grape Nuts can sell as "whole grain." That is one change in Mr. Post's formula. Another is a spray of vitamins and minerals. It qualifies Grape Nuts for food-stamp programs, and adds an element -- zinc -- that enables Dana Johnson, in Arvada, Colo., to make home-brewed Grape Nuts beer. ("Light and drinkable," he says.) Mixed with yeast (one cup per 2,000 pounds) and water, the flour turns to dough, gets chopped into 10-pound loaves and sent into a huge oven -- 1,610 loaves at a time. "Now it gets interesting," Mr. Vargas said at his workstation, watching the loaves emerge from the oven and catapult into the darkness. An instant later, they hit the fan -- a whirling high-speed shredder that rips them to smithereens. In a nearby control room, Julius Larriva, who has overseen this process for 33 years, said: "Bake and destroy, bake and destroy." The shreds dry for three hours. Then they're dumped onto rollers, crushed into crumbs, and poured through ducts down to the packaging floor -- 165,000 pounds a day, every day. Annual retail revenue: maybe $80 million. Not much, but Ralcorp has no plans just yet to sacrifice the brown stuff's identity for the sake of sales. So what's a grape nut? Arturo Palmerin paused on the boxing line, where he has worked for 18 years. "Whatever," he said. "A lot of things." Then he said, "I have no idea." "It's bread," Mr. Vargas said, standing beside him. "Bread?" Mr. Palmerin said. "Bread," said Mr. Vargas.