During my numerous years from the 1970s through the 1990s living in downtown area neighborhoods in Peterborough, Ontario, if the wind was blowing just so from the east on a damp day in particular, your olfactory receptors would be treated to the smell of what seemed to be the Cap’n Crunch corn and oat breakfast cereal being manufactured at the Quaker Oats plant on Hunter Street West on the west bank of the Otonabee River. I suppose it might have been one of the numerous other oat-based breakfast cereals they make at 34 Hunter St. W., but to my nose it was the Cap’n Crunch I always seemed to smell.
The Cap’n Crunch from Peterborough’s Quaker Oats also happens to be Kosher. Rabbi Sholom H. Adler, the Kashrus administrator for the Kashruth Council of Canada in Toronto, issued the most recent Kosher certification April 7.
The American-owned Quaker Oats Company mill started out in 1902 on the banks of the Otonabee River during a period of rapid U.S. branch plant industrialization in Peterborough, spurred on by generous municipal bonuses and concessions. Little more than a decade earlier in 1891, the Edison Electric Company (later Canadian General Electric or CGE) had opened its “Canadian Works at Peterborough.” Both the Quaker Oats Company and Canadian General Electric plants in Peterborough were designed by Port Hope-born architect George Martel Miller.
While a fifth-floor oven fire April 2 at Quaker sent nine employees to Peterborough Regional Health Centre to be assessed for smoke inhalation, a much more serious fire on Dec. 11, 1916 saw the northeast corner of the Quaker Oats plant all but burned to the ground in a devastating fire in Building 11, which began around 10 a.m., and was believed to have been caused by a spark ignited by the passage of a foreign object through a grain-rolling machine that ground oat hulls, situated in the grain dry house next to the boiler room, which set the grain dust on fire and triggered the dust explosion that followed. The fire, which reached a temperature of about 2,300°F – a temperature about 100°F hotter than the point at which cast iron melts and brickwork reaches the stage of incipient fusion – burned actively for four days and smouldered until the following March. Twenty-two workers died within days or weeks as a result of injuries, including shock and smoke inhalation, suffered in the fire and explosion. Another man died later in 1928 as the result of injuries sustained in the fire 12 years earlier. The fire caused about $2 million in property damage.
The alarm went out to neighboring Lindsay, Lakefield, Port Hope and Toronto to join Peterborough firefighters with men and equipment in battling the inferno. Quaker went on to rebuild the plant on condition the City of Peterborough build a higher Ashburnham Bridge, now known as the Hunter Street Bridge.
PepsiCo purchased Quaker Oats in August 2001 and it is part of their business unit known as PepsiCo Foods Canada. Pepsi has been in Canada since June 12, 1934, when it opened a bottling plant in Montreal.
Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch. He first set sail in 1963 from Crunch Island in the Sea of Milk – “a magical place with talking trees, crazy creatures and a whole mountain (Mount Crunchmore) made out of Cap’n Crunch cereal.” Crunch, who truth be told, wears a Napoleon-style hat and displays on his uniform the three bars of a navy commander, not the four bars of a captain, which is one rank above commander, at least in the United States Navy.
Crunch later assumed command of the S.S. Guppy and spent decades battling his arch-nemesis, the pirate known as Jean LaFoote, according to the backstory from his PR people.
Pamela Low, a New Hampshire flavorist, who died at the age of 79 in June 2007, developed and created the flavor coating for Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal.
Low studied microbiology at the University of New Hampshire. She went on to work as a flavorist for the Arthur D. Little consulting firm in the Boston area for more than 30 years. As the story goes, she was asked to develop a flavor for the new Cap’n Crunch corn and oat breakfast cereal in the early 1960s. Her inspiration for the flavor coating was a recipe flavored with butter and brown sugar that her grandmother, Luella Low, used to serve her as a child in Derry, New Hampshire.
Cap’n Crunch was officially unveiled in 1963 and the original recipe has been unchanged since its launch. Lowe also worked on the flavors for Almond Joy and Mounds candy bars while at Arthur D. Little.
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