General Mills
American consumer goods manufacturer
General Mills, Inc. is an American multinational manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer foods sold through retail stores. Founded on the banks of the Mississippi River at Saint Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, the company originally gained fame for being a large flour miller. It is headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.
Today, the company markets many well-known North American brands, including Gold Medal flour, Annie's Homegrown, Lärabar, Cascadian Farm, Betty Crocker, Nature Valley, Totino's, Pillsbury, Old El Paso, Häagen-Dazs, as well as breakfast cereals under the General Mills name, including Cheerios, Wheaties, Chex, Lucky Charms, Trix, Cocoa Puffs, and the monster cereals.
History
Washburn-Crosby Company
The company can trace its history to the Minneapolis Milling Company, incorporated in 1856. The company was founded by Illinois congressman Robert Smith, who leased power rights to flour mills operating along the west side of Saint Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cadwallader C. Washburn acquired the company shortly after its founding and hired his brother William D. Washburn to assist in the company's development. In 1866 the Washburns got into the business themselves, building the Washburn "B" Mill at the falls. At the time, the building was considered to be so large and output so vast that it could not possibly sustain itself.
“General Mills” enters the record as american consumer goods manufacturer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what General, Mills and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“General Mills” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, General, Mills and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q629998. VIAF identifies the subject as 140708541. The Library of Congress control number is n79091443. 5 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1856 and 1866.
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This entry incorporates text from “General Mills” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.