Kool-Aid
There seems to be some dispute as to whether Edwin Perkins was 12 or 14 years old when he had his idea, but it was a doozie.
Young Edward had sent away for a mail-order “start your own business” kit, and quickly set about inventing a variety of flavorings and perfumes in his mother’s kitchen. Unlike many youthful experimenters, Perkins kept at it, year after year, and by 1914, at age 24, he was operating his own mail-order business, selling a soft drink syrup mix he called “Fruit Smack.”
But the Fruit Smack bottles were expensive to mail and often arrived damaged, so Perkins decided that product modifications were called for.
The solution, as it happened, was as close as his father’s general store, where sales of the new Jell-O dry dessert mix were booming. Perkins stopped selling the liquid Fruit Smack and began selling a concentrated drink-mix powder, which he at first called “Kool-Ade,” modeling the name on “lemonade.” But to Perkins, the “ade” suffix had medicinal overtones, so he changed the name to “Kool-Aid,” which conveniently carried a connotation of “aiding” drinkers in remaining cool.
The original flavors of Kool-Aid were Cherry, Lemon-Lime, Grape, Orange, Root Beer, Strawberry, and Raspberry. Today more than 563 million gallons of Kool-Aid are consumed every year.
Milk Duds
At least they didn’t call them “Milk Screw-Ups.” When Chicago candy maker F. Hoffman & Company set out to market chocolate-covered caramels in the early 1900s, they decided to aim high and make them perfectly spherical little balls. Unfortunately, Hoffman’s chefs soon discovered that, try as they might, their perfect little chocolate caramel balls always came out little chocolate caramel lumps. Hoffman & Co. decided to market their lumpy candy anyway, and picked the name “Milk Duds,” referring to their high milk content and their less-than-perfect shape. Fortunately, the public wasn’t looking for geometric perfection in candy, and Milk Duds were an immediate hit. Now produced by Hershey Foods, Milk Duds have been popular ever since.
Jell-O
On March 17, 1993, according to the Jell-O Museum web page, technicians at St. Jerome Hospital in Batavia, NY, apparently having nothing better to do, hooked an electroencephalograph up to a bowl of lime flavor Jell-O. They were amazed, the story goes, to discover that America’s favorite gelatin dessert exhibits brain waves “identical” to an adult human being. Unrecorded but obviously relevant is whether the adult human used for comparison happened to work as a technician at St. Jerome Hospital.
But while lime Jell-O seems an unlikely candidate for the Nobel Prize in much of anything, it does hold the distinction of being a big hit in Salt Lake City, which consumes more of the green jiggly stuff than any other American metropolis.
For a brand name that today is recognized by 95% of Americans and found in 66% of their homes, Jell-O got off to a rocky start. The first person to patent a gelatin dessert, in 1845, was Peter Cooper, the inventor, manufacturer and philanthropist best known for pioneering the railroad locomotive in America. But making Cooper’s gelatin took the better part of a day and the product was not very popular.
A scant fifty years later, however, carpenter and cough-medicine purveyor Pearle B. Wait and his wife May Davis Wait of LeRoy, NY fiddled a bit with Cooper’s gelatin, and by 1897 had developed easier-to-make strawberry, raspberry, orange and lemon flavors. A name was needed for the product, and May came through with a winner — “Jell-O.”
Given the spelling “Jell-O,” May Wait was probably thinking of “jelly,” not “gelatin,” when she dreamt up the name, but the two words share a common root. The Latin “gelare” means “to freeze,” and as it percolated into various later European languages took on the connotation of “to congeal” (in fact, “congeal” itself is a descendant of “gelare”). Both “gelatin” and “jelly” were originally applied to a substance produced by boiling animal bones, skins, etc., to release collagen, which “jells” into a semi-solid as it cools. (Fruit jelly, which does not come from animals, jells because of the pectin in the fruit itself.) Today’s gelatin, including that found in Jell-O, comes from the same animal sources, but is so rigorously purified that many vegetarians consider Jell-O perfectly acceptable.
In subsequent years the Jell-O brand changed hands several times and today is owned by Kraft Foods Inc., which markets more than 150 products under the Jell-O name, including puddings, pie fillings, and Jello-O Pudding Pops. And in January 2001, all that lime finally kicked in and Jell-O was declared the “Official State Snack” of Utah. EEG testing of the legislature might be interesting.