Wheat flour is the major ingredient in tens of thousands of commercial products. One of the first branded wheat products was the Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, which was first manufactured in 1889 by Chris L. Rutt and Charles G. Underwood of St. Louis, Missouri. It became the model for a vast array of premixed food products, many of which contained flour. Cake mixes were first sold by Duncan Hines in 1929, followed by Jiffy and Bisquick in 1930, and General Mills and Pillsbury in the late 1940s.
Commercial crackers and cookies had been manufactured by many companies during the nineteenth century, but their popularity soared about 1900. When the National Biscuit Company, the forerunner of Nabisco, was formed, its first signature product was Uneeda Biscuit, a wheat cracker that was promoted by one of America’s first national food advertising campaigns in 1898. In that same year the company also introduced another wheat product, called the graham cracker in honor of Sylvester Graham. The product actually had little in common with what Sylvester Graham had originally advocated. In 1902 the company relaunched yet another cracker, Animal Biscuits, by changing the product’s name to Barnum’s Animals. Subsequently, thousands of other wheat-based cookies and crackers have been manufactured in the United States.
