In honor of Jello-O's Centennial, The Jell-O Museum will open this June in its birthplace of Le Roy, NY. The museum will include 17 original oil paintings from the 1920s that were used in Jell-O ads, vintage radio and television ads with comedian Jack Benny, and recipe books dating back to Jell-O's inception.

It explains the history of Jell-O through the decades of memorabilia like spoons, dishes and molds.

Though Jell-O left town in 1964, taking along many of its 330 employees to a new home in Dover, Del., crippling the LeRoy economy for many years, Kraft Foods, which boasts a billion dollars in annual Jell-O sales, recently donated $ 50,000 to convert an unoccupied, century-old stone building behind the Le Roy Historical Society into a museum.

Today, Americans buy, on average, 13 boxes of Jell-O every second. If a year's worth of Jell-O boxes were placed end-to-end, their length would stretch across three-fifths of the globe. [But it wasn't always so.]

Coinciding with the hoopla about Jell-O's 100th birthday is an FDA panel recommendation that stricter regulations be put on the use of foreign gelatin, because of possible links to bovine spongiform encaphalopathy, or Mad Cow disease. Gelatin is made from boiled cow bones and hides. The Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee told the FDA to ban foreign gelatin from its regulated products, reversing a 1994 FDA ruling which exempted gelatin from Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy restrictions.

Jell-O Museum will open June 1. LeRoy Historical Society, 23 East Main St., LeRoy, NY 14482, phone (716) 768-7433. Admission is $3 for adults and $1 for children.

[05/03/1997]