Quaker Oats Company
American food conglomerate
The Quaker Oats Company, known as Quaker, is an American food conglomerate based in Chicago, Illinois. As Quaker Mill Company, the company was founded in 1877 in Ravenna, Ohio. In 1881, Henry Parsons Crowell bought the company and launched a national advertising campaign for Quaker Oats.
In 1911, the company acquired the Great Western Cereal Company. The iconic cylindrical package was introduced in 1915. The company's logo, which depicts a Quaker man, has had several iterations.
In 1983, Quaker acquired Stokely-Van Camp, Inc., the maker of Van Camp's and Gatorade. In 2001, PepsiCo bought Quaker Oats for $14 billion, primarily to acquire the Gatorade brand.
History
Precursor miller companies
In the 1850s, Ferdinand Schumacher and Robert Stuart founded oat mills. Schumacher founded the German Mills American Oatmeal Company in Akron, Ohio, and Stuart founded the North Star Mills in Hearst, Ontario, then part of Rupert's Land.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2699694. VIAF identifies the subject as 158246625. The Library of Congress control number is n50062736. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1877, 1881, 1911 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quaker Oats Company” 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.