cold cereals. The Quaker Oats Company was hiring employees for a new plant in Peterborough and the Frontenac Cereal Company launched in Kingston, bringing in a former Kellogg's factory manager to help run its operations. Recognizing the threat of increased competition and changing consumer tastes, the Tillson Company turned to a 22-year-old advertising man named J.J. Gibbons for help. “Gibbons created a new advertising campaign designed to link Tillson’s oats with the active, vigorous lifestyle of a Scotsman,” says Phelps. “The ads featured a man dressed in the fashion of Robbie Burns participating in a variety of physically demanding activities. ‘The Lusty Plowman’ was one of the more memorable iterations, but other ads featured the character chopping wood, hunting, fishing, snow-shoeing, curling, skating and tobogganing.” The Scotsman appeared in the Toronto newspapers in the fall of 1902. The message was simple: Tillson’s Oats are a genuinely Canadian product, with a long and storied history. An ad appearing in the Toronto Globe on December 1, 1902 put it this way: “Tillson’s made oatmeal in Canada when modern food faddists were making dyspeptic stomachs last century by eating pie and fried pork for breakfast… Shall Canadians be fed upon the medicated fads of a nation that lost its own stomach because it lacked the wisdom and taste to eat Scotch-Canadian porridge?” Further emphasizing the point, the ad closed with
unit. The interesting dual ended when Tillson’s was bought out by the American Cereal Company (Quaker Oats) at a figure entirely satisfactory to Mr. Tillson.” So the next time you have oatmeal for breakfast, take a good look at the man on the package. You might just find he bears a striking resemblance to the former Tillson Oats man.
Gibbons reminding readers that Tillson’s Oats were, “A food, not a fad.” The phrase became a slogan, effectively establishing Tillsonburg as the home of common sense and hard work. The advertising campaign was wildly successful beyond either Gibbons’ or the Tillson Company’s wildest dreams. The Tillson Scot became a national figure prompting the Canadian Grocer to deem it, “an inspiration in trademarks.” “The spectacular sight of a small Canadian mill standing up to the American ‘octopus’ caught the popular imagination and inspired numerous editorials in Ontario dailies,” Gibbons later wrote. “Eventually the Ontario millers became an important
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