Bill Post, an inventor of the Pop-Tart, dies at 96

Bill Post, who helped invent Pop-Tarts, leading the baking-company team that developed a toaster-friendly breakfast food with a fruity filling, a thin pastry crust and an ineffable Space Age sweetness, died Feb. 10. He was 96.

His family announced the death in an obituary through MKD Funeral Homes in Grand Rapids, Mich., but did not say where or how he died.

More than six decades after Pop-Tarts were developed by Mr. Post’s baking team in Grand Rapids, the foil-wrapped snack remains as common in some kitchens and cafeterias as traditional breakfast foods such as oatmeal and eggs.

The sugary pastry brought in about $978 million in sales in 2022, according to CNBC, and became a goofy emblem of college football last season when the Pop-Tarts Bowl culminated with the “death” of its mascot, an anthropomorphic Pop-Tart named Strawberry who descended into a giant toaster, just before an oversized Pop-Tart came out through a slot at the bottom and was devoured by the winning team.

The pastry’s popularity “went beyond any expectations we had,” Mr. Post told CNBC in December. Mr. Post, one of seven children of Dutch immigrant parents, was quietly modest about his role in developing the Pop-Tart, which began with a 1963 call from the cereal giant Kellogg’s, seeking help with a breakfast pastry it wanted to market but didn’t know how to make.

“I was just the guy who said we’d do it,” he told the New York Times.

But as the plant manager for the Hekman baking company (later known as Keebler) in Grand Rapids, Mr. Post was also the one who steered the project through technical challenges in a frenetic four-month scramble to bring the pastry to market. He realized he had a hit product, he said, when his children kept asking to try more samples of his “fruit scones,” as the pastries were originally called.

“Most of the time they didn’t like what I brought home, but these fruit scones — they said, ‘Dad, bring some of these home,’” he told the West Michigan CBS affiliate WWMT in 2021.

Bill Post, an inventor of the Pop-Tart, dies at 96

The product was christened Pop-Tarts, according to a company history, in a nod to the pop art movement. And while Andy Warhol may have never painted a foil-wrapped Pop-Tart, the snacks seemed to fly off shelves as fast as cans of Campbell’s Soup. After getting an initial test release in Cleveland in 1963, it started being sold across the city the next year and then nationwide in 1965 with four original flavors: strawberry, blueberry, brown sugar cinnamon and apple currant.

The pastries’ signature frosting came a few years later. Mr. Post said he came up with the idea himself, running Pop-Tarts through a cookie-icing machine and showing the results to Kellogg’s executive William E. LaMothe. Put through a toaster, the frosting didn’t melt. Within an hour, the Associated Press later reported, LaMothe had instructed Mr. Post to frost every variety of Pop-Tart.

“We just doubled the market with that one decision made in one day,” said Mr. Post, who rose to become a senior vice president at Keebler and spent two decades as a consultant for Kellogg’s. His car was emblazoned with a “POPTART” license plate, and he said he always kept a pack of Pop-Tarts on hand. His preferred flavor: strawberry.

“We have a seniors group at church,” Mr. Post told WWMT, “and you have to bring your lunch every once in a while. I always bring my Pop-Tarts and of course they all think, ‘Poor guy, that’s all he can eat.’ But I just like to have them as a snack.”

A complete obituary will be published soon.