• Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 1, 2009 11:15 AM

For more than a century, Americans have wondered exactly what a "grape nut" was, Barry Newman reports. But the marketers of the cereal have always had a good fix on the essential ingredient. "Grape Nuts," says Carin Gendell, who was its senior brand manager in the 1980s, "was people eating advertising." (The actual stuff that people ingest, by the way, is flour.)

The cereal has a history of making health claims dating back to the days when C.W. Post's copywriters claimed, without fealty to truth, that it contained "phosphate of potash" for building "brain and nerves." But the cereal, which passed from Post to General Foods to Phillip Morris to Kraft, had lost a lot of the virility it, at times, implied it could enhance by the time it wound up as a division of Ralcorp last year.

Now Kelley Peters, Ralcorp's "insights" director, is targeting men who are at least 45 in a new, $5 million "That takes Grape Nuts" campaign. "Men aspire to it," she says. "It's strong and stern, the father figure of cereals." Sylvie Dale, a 38-year-old female editor, has a different perspective, however. "The rhythmic crunching that reverberates around your skull could be ambient sound meditation," she says.

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