The World's Largest Cereal Mill

On a clear morning in Cedar Rapids, you can smell it before you see it, a warm, faintly sweet vapor rising from the north edge of downtown, the unmistakable exhale of oats being milled on an industrial scale. The plant you're approaching is the largest cereal mill in the world, a title it has held in one form or another for over a century. It began in eighteen seventy-three when Robert Stuart, a Canadian grain miller, arrived in Cedar Rapids and recognized something remarkable: the Iowa prairie was producing oats of exceptional quality, and the Cedar River could power the mills to process them.

Stuart partnered with local investors to launch the North Star Oatmeal Company, and the plant grew quickly, exporting oats to England and Scotland before most Americans knew what oatmeal was. In eighteen eighty-eight, seven of the largest American oat millers consolidated into the American Cereal Company. On the evening of March seventh, nineteen oh five, a spontaneous combustion explosion tore through the hull grinding room, killing two people and leveling much of the complex.

Within two weeks, the owners were already rebuilding, pledging to stay in Cedar Rapids and build bigger. By nineteen oh one the company had renamed itself the Quaker Oats Company. Today the plant rises thirteen stories and one hundred ninety feet above the river, processing more than two million pounds of oats every single day.

About seven hundred forty employees work in a complex that occupies the northern edge of downtown like a small industrial city, grinding the grain of the prairie into the cereal on your breakfast table, the same essential transaction this site has performed for over one hundred fifty years.