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Quaker Oats, with its trademark "Quaker Man", is among the more recognized brands in the world. The brand was first trademarked on 4 September 1877 by Henry Seymour, owner of the Quaker Mill Company of Ravenna, Ohio.^[1]

In 1969, Quaker acquired Fisher-Price, a toy company.

In the 1970s, the company financed the making of the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, obtaining in return a license to use a number of the product names mentioned in the movie for candy bars.

In 1991, Quaker Oats spun off its Fisher-Price division.

In August 2001, Quaker merged with PepsiCo, who primarily wanted the company for its Gatorade brand of soft drink. The merger created the fourth-largest consumer goods company in the world. Though the main prize of PepsiCo was Gatorade noncarbonated sports drink, Quaker's cereal and snack food division serves as healthy complements to the existing Frito-Lay salty-snacks division.

There is a common misconception that the smiling Quaker found on boxes of Quaker Oats is William Penn. The Quaker Oats Company has stated that this is not true. The iconic image of the smiling Quaker was painted by Haddon Sundblom in 1957.

Since the late 1980s, actor Wilford Brimley has appeared in television commercials extolling the virtues of oat consumption, typically to a young child, as to introduce the concept of oatmeal consumption as a long tradition.

In the 1990s Nickelodeon animated children's show Rugrats, the biggest fear of one of the characters, Chuckie Finster (the scaredycat of the bunch), was "the man on the oatmeal box". In Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, Chuckie overcame this fear when he became Chuckie Chan. The song lyrics to his transformation included the line "He can stare into the eye/of the oatmeal guy!".

1. ^ Adams, Cecil. The Straight Dope Accessed 28 July 2006.