Jell-O Jigglers
Jell-O so firm you could pick it up: two boxes to two and a half cups of boiling water, chilled in a 13-by-9 pan and cut into stars and dinosaurs with cookie cutters. Kraft's 1990 Jigglers recipe turned a dessert your grandmother molded into finger food for the birthday party, and it lifted Jell-O sales 47 percent.
By the late 1980s Jell-O was in trouble. Sales had slid from the 1960s on, gelatin salads had become special-occasion food, and a 1986 study found that mothers with young children rarely bought it at all. The brand's marketers went back through old Jell-O cookbooks and found a recipe for extra-firm gelatin cut into shapes and eaten by hand; it had no name at the time. They called it Jigglers.
The recipe is the product: two and a half cups of boiling water to two eight-serving packages, chilled at least three hours in a 13-by-9-inch pan and cut into two dozen shapes with 2-inch cookie cutters, after dipping the pan in warm water for 15 seconds so they release. Jell-O marketed Jigglers in 1990 with a campaign fronted by its longtime spokesman Bill Cosby, pitched as fun for kids and easy for parents, and sales rose 47 percent. General Foods, Jell-O's owner, had just been folded into Kraft General Foods, and ready-to-eat Jell-O snacks followed in 1991 and Berry Blue in 1992.
For 90s kids Jigglers were the birthday-party and classroom-party food, set out on a paper plate in seasonal shapes with a wobble you could set off by bumping the table. The campaign played especially well with family-minded Mormons, and in 1997 Kraft's sales figures showed Salt Lake City had the highest per-capita Jell-O consumption in the country. Jell-O turned 100 that same year, and the recipe is still on the box and on Kraft's site, which is why a whole generation calls any firm gelatin a Jiggler.
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