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The puffing gun
Although our founding company began in flour milling in the 1860s, General Mills is now known for many different foods, especially cereal.
And one invention was crucial to our early success.
“The puffing gun is essential for our cereal group. It really changed everything that we did,” says Corporate Archivist Susan Wakefield. She explains, that before the puffing gun, General Mills only offered flaked cereal – Wheaties was introduced in 1924.
But in the 1930s, developers had a formula for the first-ever puffed corn cereal, Kix.
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There was a problem, however.
General Mills needed a cost-effective way to produce the new cereal. Developers turned to Thomas James, an engineer in the Mechanical Experimental Department, for help.
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He concocted our puffing gun and other special processing machinery.
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Phil Zeitlow began his career developing new cereal products and processes at General Mills in 1964. At that time, the C-gun was replacing the batch gun.
“This new gun produced a much more uniform product with less burned pieces … The product puffing rates through the C-Gun were originally 20-30 pounds per minute. Through many improvements the rates are now well over 100 pounds per minute,” says Phil.
Phil admits that he plugged and burned up guns too many times to count trying to puff new grains and products!
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The puffing gun, despite being 75 years old, never fails to fascinate.
