Friday, June 10 — This year’s Cereal City Festival kicks off this evening with a parade in downtown Battle Creek, Michigan. But the highlight of the festival, in the city that bills itself as the Cereal Capital of the World, is the world’s longest breakfast table. On Saturday morning, hundreds of volunteers will be serving breakfast in shifts to perhaps 70,000 people — greater than Battle Creek’s population of about 52,000. Our first enduring breakfast cereal is Shredded Wheat, created around 1893 in Denver, Colorado. Battle Creek is the birthplace of America’s flaked cereal industry in 1895, and 11 of the 69 breakfast cereal manufacturers in the U.S. have Michigan addresses. Battle Creek’s Kellogg’s and Post companies are prominent in the industry, which generates $9.8 billion of product annually.
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