The Story of Jell-O: America’s Most Famous Dessert

And we returned to our American stories. Invented in 1897, Jello immediately worked its way into the hearts and stomachs of America. In Warren p sickness and health, from Greek houses to inflatable pools, Jello was there. Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the “Today I Found Out” YouTube channel and its sister, “The Brain Food Show” podcast. Let’s take a listen.

For over a century, Jello has been a pass of American culture, and, according to a 1904 edition of the “Ladies’ Home Journal,” America’s favorite dessert. Conveniently enough named such in an advertisement paid for by Jello before anyone was really buying it at all. I’ve had said, ever since then, it really has been one of the most popular desserts in America. The story of this fruit-flavored, gelatin-based icon includes good old-fashioned American ingenuity, brilliant marketing, and a wobbly start. Gelatin, the main ingredient in Jello, has been an after-dinner delicacy for the wealthy, dating all the way back to at least the 15th century. The tasteless, odorless protein is made by extracting collagen found in connective animal tissues from boiled bones of animals, usually from cows and pigs. It was and still is a time-consuming task to make gelatine. During the Victorian Age, gelatin was extracted by boiling cow or pig hoofs in a giant cattle for several hours. Next, the liquid would be strained, and the bones discarded. The liquid was then left out for a day, give or take, to settle. After skimming the fat off the top, flavoring was added, and voilà, a gelatin dessert was born. By the early 19th century, the dessert wasn’t just popular with well-to-do Europeans, but Americans as well. Thomas Jefferson was known to serve gelatin desserts at official banquets in his Monticello, Virginia, home in the mid-19th century. Gelatine was so in demand that there was a need to make the creation of it easier. Who wanted to take time to boil cow hoofs each time? He wanted a gelatine mold at the dinner table. So, in 1845, the already famous inventor of the first American-built steam locomotive, that “Tom Thumb,” Peter Cooper, devised a way to make gelatin more accessible by making large sheets of it and grinding it into a powder. He applied for and was granted U.S. Patent 4084 for a gelatine dessert powdery called “Portable Gelatin,” requiring only the addition of hot water. Despite the future economic windfall that gelatine powder would provide, Cooper didn’t market it, not did much of anything with his invention. He sold the powder to cooks on occasion, but never commercialized it beyond that. In fact, he was more interested in the production of powdered glue. Never quite figured that secret, though, unlike Jello. As most kids find out early in life, glue does not taste fay good blue. About 30 miles outside of Rochester, New York, in the small town of Leroy, lived the married couple of Pearl and May Wait. They ran a rather unsuccessful cough syrup and laxative business. After years of this and barely scraping by, they decided one day to branch out into something that they knew better: food. So, according to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, after looking around for what to work on, they found and obtained the patents for powder gelatine. Of course, the main drawback of gelatine biz its lack of taste. They found a fix for that by combining it with something else they knew a fair bit about: making syrups. Thus, they added a significant amount of sugary fruit syrup, using strawberry, raspberry, lemon, and orange flavoring. Their product was now 88% sugar, but none of that mattered, because now gelatine actually tasted good. They named her and her husband’s new favorite dessert Jello, a combined version of the words “gelatine” and “jelly,” both of which derived from the Latin “gelaire,” meaning “to congeal or to freeze.” As for the “O” part, around this time in America, it was simply a relatively popular trend to add “O” to the end of your product name, not unlike that of preceding certain names with “i” in more modern times. In addition, adding a letter allows a business to take a common word and easily modify it to make it easy to trademark. Another example from that time would be greino, and in modern times, of course, there’s the iPhone. Unfortunately, while Pearl and May were good at making Jello, they lacked the capital and experience to market their product. On September 8, 1899, the couple sold the formula patterns and the name Jello to their Leroy neighbor, a rater Frank Woodwood, owner of the Genesee Food Company, for $450, which is about $12,000 today. Already a successful packaged food businessman, Woodward knew how to sell a product. He addressed salesmen in fancy suits and had them offer free samples to homemakers. They employed every trick in the book to get grocers to stock their shop wels with boxes of Jello still in the Wait’s original flavors: strawberry, raspberry, lemon, and orange. Despite all of this, sales still sacked. At one point, a frustrated Woodward offered to sell the product line to another Leroy townsman for a mere $35. Luckily for him, the person refused the offer. In 1904, everything changed. With the help of newly hired William E. Humblebore, Woodward decided to take some of the money he earned from the more successful products he made, including one that held a miraculous power to kill lice on hands, and he invested it into ads for Jello in the nationally syndicated “Ladies’ Home Journal.” The ad, costing $336, featured a smiling, fashionably clothed woman in white aprons, proclaiming, “Jello Gelatin: America’s Favorite Dessert!” The ads were a roaring success, and your sales quickly jumped to $250,000, about $6.2 million today. Soon, beautiful hand-drawn pictures showing pantries stuffed to the brim with Jello and kids begging for the delicious dessert were marketing the product everywhere. Woodward began printing recipe books, telling homemakers how to properly prepare their Jello. They handed out free Jello molds to immigrants arriving into Ellis Island. They introduced the Jello Girl, played by four-year-old Elizabeth King, the daughter of a brilliant ad artist, Franklin King, who Woodward working for him. With a tea kettle in one hand and a packet of Jello in the other, she declared to the world that “you can’t be a kid without it!” Due to brilliant marketing, Jello became one of the most well-known brands in American history. In 1924, understanding the power of a name, the Genesee Pure Food Company became quite simply the Jello Company. That same year, the company hired the soon-to-be-famous Norman Rockwell to draw a colorful illustration depicting Jello. With radio rising in prominence, Jello became one of the first companies to advertise on the new medium, with Jack Benny singing to the whole world in 1934 their new jingle, created by the agency Young & Rubicam. J.E.

J-E-L-L-O. The Jello Program, starring Jack Benny, with Mary Livingston and Bill Harrison, his orchestra.

By the mid-1970s, formerly strong and steady sales of Jello, including their pudding line, began declining, so they hired the 37-year-old comedian Bill Cosby to be their spokesperson.

Ooh, Jello Pudding Pops! Lou, Yellow Pulling Pup. “When Daniel Cady knew Jello Pudding Pups: frozen pudding on a stick.” Play.

give you the “old evil eye,” like

she does with some snacks, because she knows that this is made with real pudding.

It worked, and Cosby brought Jello to new hypes. The Cosby Jello relationship lasted for over 30 years and whiles, according to Mary Cross’s book, “A Century of American Icons,” the longest-standing celebrity endorsement in American advertising history. In 1964, the plants in Leroy, New York, closed when the conglomerate General Foods (now Kraft Foods) took over production. But Jello is still represented in that small town with the Jello Gallery and Museum dedicated to all things Jello, and now some bonus facts. J-E-L-L-O. “It’s alive!” Well, actually, technically Jello is alive, at least according to a 1974 experiment performed by Dr. Adrian Upton. Dr. Upton attached an EEG electro and cathlogram machine to a dome of lime green jello. The jello produced alpha waves much the same way and awaken a life human would produce. This experiment set the media a flatter, as they like to sensationalize everything then as now. But what Dr. Upton was really trying to prove is that an EEG should not be the only method used to determine if a human is alive or not. And now for another bonus fact. In 2001, Utah State Representative Leonard M. Blackham introduced State Resolution 5. This legislation declares that Jello brand gelatine be recognized as the favorite snack of Utah. It passed with only two dissenting votes. The resolution was popular because Jello is well known to be a favorite among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Six, otherwise known as the Mormons. Sales figures, released by Kraft Foods in 2001, revealed that Salt Lake City, Utah, had the highest per capita Jello consumption of anywhere else in the country. Due to this, the Mormon Corridor region in Utah has been given the nickname the “Jello Belt.”

The story of Jello, one of America’s favorite desserts. Here on our American Stories.