Jello: The Jell-O Museum, Le Roy, NY

It doesn’t get more American than Jell-O. Maybe a deep-fried Oreo, but those don’t have beloved comedian Bill Cosby as its spokesperson, nor do they have the ability to be cut into the shape of a stegosaurus. Jell-O is as American as it gets.

IT'S ALIVE!

 Jello took shape under the ownership of cough syrup manufacturer Pearle Bixby Wait in Le Roy, New York, now home to the Jell-O Museum, a celebration of all things wiggly and fruit flavored. Wait claims responsibility for adding fruity flavoring to the plain powder and branding the product “Jell-O.” Americans were slow to warm up to the product, but some slick guerilla marketing tactics involving the Kewpies and strategically placed adverts in women’s magazines gave the new confection some cache, and America ate it up.

In the 1950s, Americans decided that consuming Jell-O only as a dessert item was simply not frequent enough, so the company began manufacturing savory flavors, including celery, Italian, and seasoned tomato, all of which sound pretty gross to us but you can’t hate them for trying something different. In the time of the picture perfect all-American family, salad probably looked really good in a bundt-cake mold on a lot of dining room tables.

Sounds...healthy?

 The museum contains dozens of vintage adverts for the product, many depicting the “Jell-O Girl,” a LeRoy local who posed in ads for Jello for years (until she became old and dried up like most child stars and could only get work in infomercials.) She was eventually replaced by a giraffe and then, the most famous man in comedy/pudding, Bill Cosby.

The Jell-O girl in her glory days.

The museum takes you through Jell-O’s history and the way it revolutionized cooking in the American household – it was one of the first “instant” foods created. Now there is an entire aisle dedicated to foods prepared in under ten minutes, but at its inception, Jell-O was unique. 

Here are some randomly weird things we learned about Jell-O:

- People could serve Jell-O 69,089 ways over 189 years and still not exhaust all the ways to serve Jell-O.

- Jell-O and brain matter produce similar waves when tested on an EEG machine.

- Utah residents purchase more Jell-O than those of any other state.

- The most popular flavor of Jell-O is strawberry.

Whether it's your favorite dessert or something you believe should be reserved for when you have your wisdom teeth out, there is no denying Jell-O is steadfastly American and delightfully weird.