Jell-O went from a New York carpenter’s kitchen experiment to one of America’s most iconic and enduring dessert staples after Pearle Bixby Wait, who invented the fruit-flavored gelatin dessert in 1897, trademarked it and sold the brand two years later.
Decades later, the brand’s legacy became a mass-market go-to enjoyed across social classes.
It eventually developed a second life as a popular ingredient in gelatin shots. By the 1980s, Jell-O shots had become increasingly popular.
Beyond its heritage, the brand has a bizarre and almost accidental backstory in food history.
Before becoming the billion-dollar brand that the public knows today, Jell-O was an experiment by Wait in his kitchen.
The carpenter in LeRoy, New York, tried to build a business selling cough syrup and laxatives, but neither venture took off.
Wait eventually turned his attention to gelatin, combining it with granulated sugar and fruit flavorings to create a more appealing dessert.
Although Peter Cooper had patented the first powdered “Portable Gelatin” decades earlier, his product was unflavored and lacked sweetness.
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Wait and his wife, May, turned the basic gelatin powder into a more enticing dessert by adding sugar and fruit flavorings, particularly strawberry, raspberry, orange and lemon.
The wobbly, fruity dessert got its iconic name after May Wait came up with “Jell-O.”
Unfortunately, despite Pearle Bixby Wait’s determination to turn the dessert into a successful business and a failed attempt to sell it door to door, their lack of marketing experience, capital and sales expertise left the product struggling to gain a foothold in the market.
This is when he decided to sell the entire rights to a neighbor named Orator Woodward, the owner of the Genesee Pure Food Company, for $450.
As for Woodward, he focused on marketing the product, eventually launching aggressive advertising campaigns that helped transform Jell-O into a household name.
One of his strategies was to promote the brand with free recipe booklets, magazine advertisements and giveaways such as molds.
Realizing that Jell-O needed more than a good recipe to succeed, Woodward also introduced catchy advertising characters like the Jell-O Girl to help turn the product into a recognizable household brand.
In 2011, Jell-O has more than 110 products, and more than 420 million boxes of gelatin and over 1 billion Jell-O cups are sold in the United States each year.
Meanwhile, strawberry was named the most popular Jell-O flavor at 14.2%, followed by lime and cherry.
Related: In 1978, Southern Living printed L.H. Wiggins’s hummingbird cake recipe; it was voted the magazine’s favorite in 1990 and is the most requested in its history
