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And we return to Our American Stories. Invented in 1897, Jell-O immediately worked its way into the hearts and the stomachs of America. In War and Peace, Sickness and Health, from Greek houses to inflatable pools, Jell-O 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, Jell-O has been a part 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 Jell-O before anyone was really buying it at all.
Of that 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 Jell-O, 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 gelatin. During the Victorian age, gelatin was extracted by boiling cow or pig hooves in a giant kettle 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, voila, 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, gelatin was so in demand that there was a need to make the creation of it easier. Who wanted to take time to boil cow hooves each time you wanted a gelatin mold at the dinner table? In 1845, the already famous inventor of the first American-built steam locomotive, the 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 a patent, U.S. Patent 4084, for a gelatin dessert powder he called Portable Gelatin, requiring only the addition of hot water. Despite the future economic windfall a gelatin powder would provide, Cooper didn't market it, nor 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. He never quite figured out that secret, though. Unlike Jell-O, as most kids find out early in life, glue does not taste very good.
Early Life About 30 miles outside of Rochester, New York, in the small town of Leroy, lived the married couple of Pearl and Mae Waite. 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 they knew better – food. So, according to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, after looking around for what to work on, they found and obtained the patent for powdered gelatin. Of course, the main drawback of gelatin is 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 for flavoring.
Their product was now 88% sugar, but none of that mattered because now gelatin actually tasted good. Mae named her and her husband's new favorite dessert Jell-O, a combined version of the words gelatin and jelly, both of which derive from the Latin gelare, meaning to congeal or to freeze. As for the O part, around this time in America was simply a relatively popular trend to add O to the end of your product name, not unlike the fad 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 grain-O and, in the modern times, of course, the iPhone. Unfortunately, while Pearl and Mae were good at making Jell-O, they lacked the capital and experience to market their product. On September 8, 1899, the couple sold the formula, patent, and the name Jell-O to their Leroy neighbor, orator Frank Woodward, 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 dressed his salesman in fancy suits and had them offer free samples to homemakers.
They employed every trick in the book to get grocers to stock their shelves with boxes of Jell-O, still in the weight's original flavors – strawberry, raspberry, lemon, and orange. Despite all this, sales still sagged. 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 Jell-O in the nationally syndicated Ladies Home Journal. The ad, costing $336, featured a smiling, fashionably coiffed woman in white aprons proclaiming, Jell-O, gelatin, America's favorite dessert. The ads were a roaring success.
Annual sales quickly jumped to $250,000, about $6.2 million today. Soon, beautiful hand-drawn pictures showing pantries stuffed to the brim with Jell-O and kids begging for the delicious dessert were marketing the product everywhere. Woodward began printing recipe books telling homemakers how to properly prepare their Jell-O. They handed out free Jell-O molds to immigrants arriving into Alice Island. They introduced the Jell-O Girl, played by four-year-old Elizabeth King, the daughter of a brilliant ad artist, Franklin King, who Woodward had worked for him.
With a tea kettle in one hand and a packet of Jell-O in the other, she declared to the world that, You can't be a kid without it. Due to brilliant marketing, Jell-O became one of the most well-known brands in American history. In 1924, understanding the power of a name, the Genesey Pure Foods Company became, quite simply, the Jell-O Company.
That same year, the company hired the soon-to-be-famous Norman Rockwell to draw a colorful illustration depicting Jell-O. With radio rising in prominence, Jell-O 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 and Rubicam, J-E-L-L-O. By the mid-1970s, formerly strong and steady sales of Jell-O, including their pudding line, began declining so they hired the 37-year-old comedian Bill Cosby to be their spokesperson. It worked and Cosby brought Jell-O to new heights. The Cosby-Jell-O relationship lasted for over 30 years and was, according to Mary Cross's book, A Century of American Icons, the longest-standing celebrity endorsement in American advertising history.
In 1964, the plant in Leroy, New York closed when the conglomerate General Foods, now Kraft Foods, took over production. But Jell-O is still represented in that small town with the Jell-O Gallery, a museum dedicated to all things Jell-O. Actually, technically, Jell-O is alive, at least according to a 1974 experiment performed by Dr. Adrian Upton. Dr. Upton attached an EEG electro- and cephalogram machine to a dome of lime-green Jell-O. The Jell-O produced alpha waves much the same way an awake and alive human would produce. This experiment set the media aflatter, as they liked 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. In 2001, Utah State Representative Leonard M. Blackham introduced State Resolution 5. This legislation declared that Jell-O brand gelatin be recognized as the favorite snack of Utah.
It passed with only two dissenting votes. The resolution was popular because Jell-O is well known to be a favorite among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons. Sales figures released by Kraft Foods in 2001 revealed that Salt Lake City, Utah had the highest per capita Jell-O consumption of anywhere else in the country.
Due to this, the Mormon Corridor region in Utah has been given the nickname, the Jell-O Belt. Honestly, can anything be more exhilarating? Well, actually, yeah. We finally switched to T-Mobile, because with them, we can be connected here and there. Dad, the cousins in Mexico have a surprise for you. And enjoy the gift of staying connected. Switch and start saving today. Get four Samsung Galaxy S25 phones with Galaxy AI on us and four lines for just 25 bucks per line.
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