Jell-O Comes to Canada: “America’s most famous dessert” and the Politics of Place

Michael Dawson

Since its creation in 1897, Jell-O has been synonymous with the United States. Early Jell-O dessert booklets featured George Washington’s visage.¹ American entertainment icons ranging from Jack Benny to Bill Cosby have pitched it to consumers. American astronauts shared it with their Russian counterparts on the Mir space station. And several online commentators were quick to suggest that Canadians boycott the wobbly stuff in response to Donald Trump’s tariff threats. Jell-O is clearly an enduring symbol of Americana.² And yet its history is more transnational and complicated than one might think. Indeed, Jell-O’s reception and significance has been shaped not simply by its country of origin but by where (and how) it is promoted and consumed.

Canada is part of that story. We don’t know when the first package of Jell-O made its way into a Canadian kitchen, but we do know that by 1905 a Jell-O branch plant had been established in Bridgeburg, Ontario. A flurry of Canadian-based promotional material followed. For example, the Jell-O Company of Canada immediately tempted Canadians with a booklet offering “New Jell-O recipes” while a booklet titled Jell-O the Dainty Dessert championed Jell-O as a “Made in Canada” product.³ Indeed, by the mid-1920s a product that had first been marketed as “America’s Most Famous Dessert” was being advertised north of the border as “Canada’s Most Famous Dessert.”

That the original slogan was modified for a new environment is significant but not necessarily surprising. More revealing is the extent to which the supporting images within this promotional material were edited to appeal to (or at least not offend) Canadian sensibilities – especially regarding the issue of race. Canada has a well-documented history of anti-black racism. But it also has an established pattern of failing to come to terms with that history by favourably contrasting its history of race relations with that of the United States. At the forefront of that selective mythology is a focus on American slavery and its legacies. Jell-O’s marketers appear to have been keenly aware of this pattern when, in the 1920s, they chose to recalibrate their advertising for the Canadian market.

During the 1920s, Jell-O advertising in North America focused on both the product’s convenience (the fact that it could be consumed almost anywhere) and its connection with idealized domestic settings. Both themes were central to a 1922 “at home everywhere” advertising campaign in the United States and Canada. Booklets distributed in both countries featured images of people serving or consuming Jell-O in a series of disparate settings: camping in the woods, on a farm in the “wheat belt,” and in a snow-bound cabin. Indeed, both the American and Canadian versions of the booklet featured a bear and a cabin on the cover. But the Canadian and American booklets differed on one key point. The American booklet included a plantation in its compilation of idealized Jell-O consuming locations and featured an illustration of an African-American boy serving the dessert to a white woman at the “Big House.” The Canadian version did not. When it came to promoting their product in Canada, Jell-O’s advertisers recognized that while some cultural allusions were transferable, others were not. Jell-O could be both Canada’s and America’s “most famous” dessert but the reference points used to justify such claims required selectivity and political awareness.⁴

Such insights were important given that the Canadian gelatine market in the 20^th century was a crowded one. Jell-O may have been the dominant brand when it came to instant flavoured desserts, but it faced competition from other gelatine companies such as Knox, Royal, and Davis, that tended to focus on marketing their gelatine powders as cooking ingredients. As these companies battled for commercial space their advertising campaigns attempted to differentiate their products. Knox, for instance, shifted from an early focus on the purity of the calves’ hooves incorporated into its product to concentrating on the theme of “gel-cookery” and its contribution to modern cooking. Royal gelatine responded to Jell-O’s use of celebrity endorsements by securing the services of Ginger Rogers – who was keen to convince consumers that Royal Desserts were “as thrilling as a burst of applause.”⁵ Davis gelatine, on the other hand, went out of its way to emphasize its popularity not just in Canada but throughout the British Empire.⁶

Indeed, “place” was central to this battle for consumer allegiance – and the methods employed by these companies to address concerns about their products’ ingredients and origins.

Some copy writers worked diligently to find the right balance between celebrating Jell-O’s global supply chain and reassuring Canadian consumers about quality control. Hence, a booklet titled Jell-O Rhymes explained that Jell-O products boasted sugar from Java, Cuba, and South America; tartartic acid from France and Italy; orange and lemon colours from Sicily and India; and chocolate from Brazil. The gelatine itself, however, came from “our own Empire.” All of these ingredients, it was quick to add, were “wholesome” and “beautiful” and “essential…to the well-being of man.” And to maintain the purity of the product, they were “assembled” in Jell-O’s “spotlessly clean, efficient, and charming” Canadian factory by “immaculately garbed workers whose hands guide the machines, but never touch the product.”⁷ Canadian-made Jell-O was at once exotic and local; worldly and familiar; fun and safe. And the Bridgeburg factory was expected to play a key role in both assuaging Canadian consumers’ concerns about quality and safety and in forging a symbolic national link with the Jell-O brand.

Such claims reflected the necessity of assuaging consumers’ concerns about Jell-O’s ingredients and its status as a dessert (and thus unhealthy) food. A 1930 Jell-O booklet published in Toronto, for example, claimed that “Jell-O is one of the easiest foods in all the world to digest” and highlighted its “pure fruit flavours” and “pure cane sugar.”⁸ That same year General Foods published What you can do with Jell-O – a booklet that acknowledged the product’s core identity as a dessert but emphasized that it was quickly becoming an important ingredient in a broader range of cooking and baking. It provided a detailed “chemical analysis” of Jell-O and estimates on the number of calories consumed per serving.⁹ In fact, over time, gelatine desserts and products were reimagined as weight-loss aids. Knox seems to have been the most explicit on this front and its advertising campaigns could hardly be accused of subtlety. Hence, a 1939 booklet urged consumers to “Be Fit Not Fat!”¹⁰ while emphasizing its status as a non-flavoured and sugar-free gelatine. Gelatine, from this perspective, was a core ingredient not just in sugary treats – but in a healthy diet as well.

America’s “most famous dessert” clearly became a popular product and cooking ingredient in Canada. But the cultural politics of gelatine ensured that this was a complicated process that featured companies competing for Canadian consumers and, of necessity, addressing issues ranging from adulteration to national identity and from race relations to healthy eating habits. Jell-O’s entry into the Canadian market undoubtedly replicated many of the patterns seen in the United States but local factors in Canada occasionally broke the mold (sorry) and required marketers to actively respond to Canadian consumer sensibilities. It behooves us (sorry again) to examine these tensions. For they allow us to connect Jell-O’s history to the history of gelatine more broadly and to recognize that while Jell-O was invented in the United States its history and significance is not confined to developments within that country.

1. University of Guelph Archives & Special Collections [UGASC], Jell-O: America’s Most Famous Dessert (LeRoy, NY; Jell-O Co., 1926), cover. ↩︎
2. On Jell-O’s connection to American culture, see Donna R. Gabaccia, “As American as Budweiser and Pickles?” in Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, eds. W. Belasco and P. Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2002), 245; Susan Grove Hall. “The Protean Character of Jello, Icon of Food and Identity.” Studies in Popular Culture 31, no. 1 (2008): 69–80; Wendy Wall, “Shakespearean Jell-O: Mortality and Malleability in the Kitchen,” Gastronomica 6,1 (2006): 41-50; Sarah E. Newton, “‘The Jell-O Syndrome’: Investigating Popular Culture/Foodways.” Western Folklore 51, no. 3/4 (1992): 249–67. ↩︎
3. UGASC, Jell-O: The Dainty Dessert. (Bridgeburg, ON: Genesee Pure Food Co, c.1905), cover. ↩︎
4. UGASC, Jell-O: America’s most famous dessert, at home everywhere. (Le Roy, NY: Genesee Pure Food Co., 1922; Jell-O, Canada’s most famous dessert, at home everywhere (Bridgeburg, ON: Genesee Pure Food Co. of Canada Ltd. c1922). ↩︎
5. UGASC, Royal Desserts Recipes (New York: Standard Brands Inc., 1940), cover. ↩︎
6. UGASC, Davis Dainty Dishes, (Toronto: Davis Gelatine Canada Ltd, 1948), 1. ↩︎
7. UGASC, Caroline B. King, Lucille Patterson Marsh, Jell-O Rhymes [Many reasons for Jell-O] (Toronto. Standard Lith, n.d.), 19. ↩︎
8. UGASC, New Jell-O book of surprises: desserts, salads. (Toronto: General Foods Ltd, 1930), 3. ↩︎
9. [1] UGASC, What you can do with Jell-O. (New York: Jell-O Division, General Foods, Corp, c. 1930), 26. ↩︎
10. UGASC, Mrs Knox’s ‘Be Fit Not Fat’ Recipes (Johnstown, NY: C.B. Knox Gelatine Co. Inc., 1939). ↩︎

Michael Dawson is Professor of History at St. Thomas University where he teaches courses on Canadian history, the global history of sport and tourism, Disney and World History, and the comparative history of national identity and popular culture in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.