Jell-O Has Delighted Many American Households. But For One Family, It Was A Curse

By 1964 the beacon had gone out for LeRoy. In a move that would change the town forever, General Foods closed the original Jell-O factory and relocated manufacturing from New York to Delaware. Families who’d worked for Jell-O for generations were suddenly faced with an impossible choice: leave the only home they’d ever known, or lose their only job. Many LeRoy natives, so betrayed by Jell-O’s departure, vowed never to buy it again. They knew what they’d had was special.

LeRoy’s sudden crisis reflected a larger, national one: looming cultural and economic upheaval, an identity in limbo. Like many small towns in America, LeRoy was actively losing the jobs that had made it prosperous. They knew no magical mass-produced cash cow would come their way again. And although Haloid Xerox, Lapp Insulator, and Eastman Kodak, staples of Rochester’s economy, mercifully stayed put (for the time being, however: Kodak laid off thousands of employees in 1997 and declared bankruptcy in 2012), the decampment of Jell-O marked the beginning of the end of the region’s boom time.