Shamoon, 37, first tried out the idea of a Jell-O restaurant in his hometown of Greenville, Miss. He called the place Hello I’m … Jell-O, a delightful name that ran smack into one of the most revered trademarks at Kraft General Foods. “I opened on June 22, 1991.” he says. “In September I had a certified letter in my hands from General foods. They called me once a day for nine months, they called me before I got out of bed in the morning.” Shamoon tried Hello I’m … Jellatin, but the company wasn’t mollified. They finally agreed on Hello I’m … Gellatin, which gets the idea across if not the euphony.
After 18 months he moved the shop to a bigger venue in Augusta, Ga. sales jumped nearly 70 percent. Shamoon says his business was almost neck and neck with a Baskin-Robbins outlet (the ice-cream shops typically net about $200,000 a year each). “And Baskin-robbins has been around for 30 years,” he says. That’s when I knew I needed to be in Atlanta." In March he opened in Market Square. “Some people have eaten here five times,” he says. “A fellow drove over on his lunch hour because he heard there was a Jell-O shop. He expected to see the little cubes. He said, ‘This is far beyond what I expected’.”
It’s far beyond what anyone would expect. Shamoon has about 400 recipes on hand for entrees, salads and desserts, some contributed by Kraft General Foods, some donated by his mother and many that he dreamed up himself “You just let your imagination fly,” he says. One of his best sellers is his mother’s Cherry Cola Supreme: cherry Jell-O made using Coke, pineapple juice and cherry juice instead of water, then mixed with cream cheese, chopped pecans and canned pineapple. Prices range from 99 cents for three Jell-O lollipops (radiant discs of Jell-O on plastic straws) to $2.25 for an elaborate Rainbow Parfait (10 layers of Jell-O, five plain and five mixed with sour cream). Customers can eat in or take out, and Shamoon also caters. “I did 300 dinner salads of Cherry Cola Supreme for a family reunion in Augusta,” he says.
It’s no surprise that Shamoon finds Jell-O an easy sell: it’s been around since 1879 (Kraft General Foods is at work on a splashy centennial celebration) and may have the highest brand-name recognition of any food product in the country. More than 92 percent of Americans know the name Jell-O, and more than 60 percent of households serve it. “Jell-O has changed very little over the years,” says Rosemarie Bria, who wrote a 1991 Ph.D. dissertation on the creation and marketing of Jell-O. (Bria earned her doctorate in nutrition education at Columbia Teachers College while attending law school; she now practices law.) The chief innovations have been new flavors: today there are 20, not including the short-lived “mixed vegetable.”
In recent years, however, Jell-O has suffered a few dark nights of the soul. According to Bria’s dissertation, which is based on company archives, Kraft General Foods learned from focus groups in the ’80s that women found Jell-O “too complicated” and too time-consuming to make. (Jean Elliott Brown, a spokeswoman for Kraft General Foods, says the company was unaware of Bria’s dissertation and had no comment on her findings.) There wasn’t much that could be done to make Jell-O easier to prepare-basically the directions say to add water, stir and wait-but the time problem had been plaguing the product for years. Back in 1944 the company introduced the “speed set” method of making Jell-O, which calls for ice cubes to replace some of the water. That cut the waiting time to 30 minutes–still along way from truly instant gratification. In the ’70s, according to Bria, technicians experimented with a new gelatin formula using carrageen, a seaweed, and found that the resulting Jell-O became firm in just 10 minutes. But incorporating other ingredients was difficult: as one report quoted by Bria puts it, “A stable emulsion with Cool Whip was unattainable.” Forget that. Jell-O sales declined during the ’70s and ’80s–apparently neither hippies nor Yuppies wanted to hang around the refrigerator waiting for desert–but they’re on the rebound. Last year Americans bought 600,000 boxes a day, an increase of 1.5 percent over 1992. “As the baby boomers have babies, there’s a return to the foods we had as kids,” says Brown. “And everybody likes Jell-O.” Shamoon agrees. He has received dozens of inquiries from people eager for a franchise: the first will open in Branson, Mo., a country-and-Western mecca, early next year. But the new operators will have to understand that this is no ordinary franchise. “For customers, it’s a real personal thing,” says Shamoon. One day an elderly woman brought in her favorite Jell-O recipe–Pink Salad–written out neatly on a flowered recipe card. “She brought me a sample, too, and it was delicious,” says Shamoon. “I’m going to do that salad.” That just wouldn’t happen at a Baskin-Robbins.
