John Harvey Kellogg, a doctor and Seventh Day Adventist who ran a wellness retreat called the Battle Creek Sanitarium, is credited with inventing ready-to-eat cereal in 1878. Granula, as it was originally called, was designed to help treat illnesses such as dyspepsia. “The Sanitarium wanted something to give its patients instead of breakfasts with sausages and eggs and bacon,” says Martin Gitlin, the author of The Great American Cereal Book. Kellogg’s brother went on to found what would become the Kellogg Company, still one of the biggest purveyors of breakfast cereal today.

The success of granula (or corn flakes) inspired Grape Nuts, which contain neither grapes nor nuts and were invented by C.W. Post after a stay in Kellogg’s sanitarium. Early ads claimed Grape Nuts could do everything from cure the desire for liquor to prevent malaria. A senior brand manager for the product in the 1980s told The Wall Street Journal that Grape Nuts was “people eating advertising.”

But cereal as an example of the power of marketing largely took place in the 1950s onward. Companies began to take advantage of the new full-scale commercial broadcasting that began in 1947 to advertise to young Baby Boomers via their television sets. By this time, Kellogg’s and Post’s dreams of cereal as a kind of medicine had already begun to fade. According to Gitlin, a salesman from Philadelphia named Jim Rex saw his kids adding sugar to their cereal and invented the first pre-sweetened cereal, Wheat Honnies, in 1939. Along with the cereal came a mascot to help market it—Ranger Joe Honnies. From then on, these friendly characters became a crucial part of selling cereal. “TV advertisements were absolutely huge and had tie-ins in the ’50s and ’60s with cartoons and Westerns,” Gitlin says. The phenomenon went on to include iconic characters like Tony the Tiger (Frosted Flakes) and Snap, Crackle, and Pop (Rice Krispies).

But starting in the ’60s and ’70s, sugar became slightly less of a selling point. Accordingly, the word itself began vanishing from ads and boxes, only to be replaced by subtler terms like “honey” and “golden.” Products that didn’t adapt quickly enough, like Sugaroos, suffered as parents caught up with new science. But, as new products like Cheerios Protein indicate, the products themselves didn’t get any less sweet.

Today, thanks to the shrewd marketing of companies like Post and Kellogg, breakfast cereal still has a nostalgic hold on many. It’s what’s inspired a Cereality Café franchise with stores in places like Texas and Virginia. It’s also what spurred Scott Bruce, the author of Cerealizing America, to try to open a cereal museum called FlakeWorld on the Las Vegas strip. And yet most of these efforts have failed: Bruce raised a few million in funding before the dot-com bubble burst and investors abandoned the project, and most shops in the Cereality Café franchise have shuttered, deemed to be too gimmicky.