After Henry Perky, the inventor of the first shredded wheat cereal, died in 1908 and his two patents, on the biscuits and the machinery that made them, expired in 1912, the Kellogg Company began selling a similar pillow-shaped cereal. Previously, John Harvey Kellogg said that eating the cereal was like “eating a whisk broom,” and critics at the World Fair in Chicago in 1893 called it “shredded doormat,” but the product surprisingly took off.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ten-famous-intellectual-property-disputes-18521880/