Bill Post dead at 96: Inventor William ‘Bill’ Post who created Pop-Tarts despite friends saying it was ‘not such a good idea’ dies

The man who invented the iconic breakfast food Pop-Tarts has died at the age of 96.

William “Bill” Post was working as a manager for the Michigan-based Hekman Biscuit Company, which was later renamed Keebler, when Kellogg’s outsourced an idea to the company and came up with a breakfast pastry for the toaster.

In several interviews over the years, Post has said that many of his then-colleagues were against his pop-tart idea. Known as fruit scones in the project, the name was changed to Pop Tart to capitalize on the pop art phenomenon of the 1960s.

“There were so many naysayers. Some of my close friends said, “I don’t know Bill.” They would tell us it’s not such a good idea,” he said in one Interview from 2021.

Post began working for the company on his 16th birthday and took a break to serve his country in occupied Japan in the aftermath of World War II.

According to CNBC, Pop-Tarts has annual sales of approximately $1 billion in the United States alone

After returning from military service, Post began working his way up the ranks at Keebler. It was 1964 when Kellogg’s called asking for a toastable breakfast treat his obituary.

Post told WWMT in 2021 that the challenge his idea faced was adding a second layer of dough on top of the filling. “To do that, I had to break every rule in the book,” he said in a corporate video produced by Kellogg’s.

Once that was accomplished, it took just four months for the company to create enough samples, about 10,000, to send out for testing. The four original flavors were strawberry, blueberry, chokeberry and brown sugar cinnamon.

The flavors sold out quickly, prompting an immediate order of another 45,000, which also sold out.

‘They just flew off the shelves. Kellogg’s took out a full-page ad: ‘Oops! We gambled! Sorry, we ran out of Pop-Tarts.” From then on, we’ve been running ever since,” Post told Fox 17 in 2023.

According to CNBC, Pop-Tarts has annual sales of approximately $1 billion in the United States alone. This year, Jerry Seinfeld makes his directorial debut in Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story for Netflix.

‘I brought home a lot of stuff, samples that you had examined, and they would turn up their noses, they didn’t like this or that. But they always asked me, “Take those fruit scones home.” That’s what we used to call them internally. Fruit scones. “Bring some home, Dad?” he told the Associated Press in 2003.

Post retired as Keebler’s senior vice president in 1985. He later rejoined Kellogg’s in an advisory role.

After a few years of success, the glaze was added, with naysayers once again claiming it would create a sticky mess in toasters across the country. Post later said it took a day to perfect a formula that worked.

The four original flavors were strawberry, blueberry, chokeberry and brown sugar cinnamon, new flavors have since come thick and fast

Over the years, the Pop Tarts brand has expanded far beyond its original concept

For the icing, Post came up with the idea after running some Pop-Tarts through a cookie icing machine.

He took some of the frozen Pop-Tarts with him to show Bill Lamothe, a Kellogg executive responsible for pastry development at the company. Lamothe would later become chairman and CEO of Kellogg.

“So I came to Battle Creek with a toaster in hand, icing on Pop-Tarts,” Post says. “We put them in the toaster and showed him that it didn’t melt. And he said, ‘Wow, that’s really something.’

Within an hour, Lamothe ordered Post to freeze all types of Pop-Tarts, a quick decision that exemplified Kellogg’s entrepreneurial spirit at the time, Post says.

“We just doubled the market with that one decision in one day,” he says. ‘That’s how sharp Kellogg is at detecting trends.’

Over the years, competitors like Pillsbury, Nabisco and Post have introduced their own toaster pastries, with varying degrees of success.

In a 2021 interview with WWNT, Post said he still ate pop tarts regularly, preferring strawberries and eating them cold.

“Bill would say, ‘I put together a great team that developed Kellogg’s concept of a shelf-stable toaster dough into a beautiful product that could be brought to market in just ‘four months,’” reads his online tribute.

For most of his life, Post was married to his high school sweetheart Florence, who passed away in 2020.

Bob Keith, a professor of nutrition and food sciences at Auburn University, says there’s nothing wrong with having an occasional Pop-Tart for breakfast.

‘They are enriched with certain vitamins. They have some sugar in them, but they don’t really have a lot of fat,” says Keith. “So, for example, if you ate that Pop-Tart in the morning with a glass of milk, that would be an acceptable breakfast for some breakfasts that week.”