William P. Stiritz
Co-founder 2012Background
William P. Stiritz is a longtime consumer-products executive associated with Ralston Purina, Ralcorp, and the early Post Holdings capital-allocation model. It succeeds.
Role at Post Holdings, Inc.
Post Holdings possesses arguably the most historic, competitive, and ideological founding story in the entire global food industry, rooted entirely in the restrictive health sanitarium culture of late 19th-century Battle Creek, Michigan. The company was founded in 1895 in Battle Creek by C.W. Post. Post was an ambitious, exhausted, and chronically ill businessman from Illinois. Searching for a cure for his debilitating stomach problems, he traveled to the world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by the legendary, eccentric Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. While recovering at the sanitarium Post was fascinated by the austere diet forced upon the patients (specifically a hard, unpalatable baked wheat mixture designed to heavily suppress sinful carnal desires). Post possessed a world-changing 'eureka' moment: this healthy food was terrible, but if he heavily sweetened it and marketed it to the public, he could create a lucrative global industry. He founded the Postum Cereal Company. His foundational masterstroke was inventing 'Grape-Nuts' in 1897 (a revolutionary, crunchy cold cereal). Post was a brilliant, intensely aggressive marketer, pioneering controversial national advertising campaigns that heavily claimed his cereal cured everything from appendicitis to malaria. By stealing the fundamental concepts of the Kellogg sanitarium and commercializing them, C.W. Post established the foundational architecture of the modern global breakfast industry, sparking a bitter, century-long corporate war.