NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

May 18, 2000

Plains Folk: Inspired by Jell-O

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©2000 Plains Folk

It's like Pizza Hut, or Mr. Bubble, or the wishbone formation. It was a bright idea born in an entrepreneurial mind on the plains. It grew until outgrew its home town and became an American icon. It is Kool-Aid.

The story begins--depending on which story you prefer--in the little town of Hendley, Neb., where a boy named Edwin Perkins was fumbling his way toward the big time. His parents had removed to Hendley from a farm in Furnas County and were operating a general store. When he was about 12, Edwin sent off for a "Mixer's Guide" he had seen advertised--a kit with formulae for products the buyer could mix up and sell.

There in Hendley he worked up a variety of specialties he sold via agents or, in the case of his "Nix-O-Tine" stop-smoking concoction, by direct mail. In 1918 he married his childhood sweetheart, Kitty Shoemaker, the girl some accounts credit with having introduced Perkins as a boy to the wonders of Jell-O, a product he admired all his life. On Valentine's Day 1920, they moved to the larger and better-connected town of Hastings.

Several towns claim credit for the origins of Kool-Aid, but the case for Hastings made by Dick Witt, an attorney and historian in that town, is convincing. Witt not only reviews the chronology of Kool-Aid but also notes that Edwin Perkins himself, more than once, identified a building on First Street of Hastings as the "Birthplace of Kool-Aid." This is all written up in an issue of the Historical News, newsletter of the Adams County (Hastings) Historical Society.

The key seems to have been Perkins's determination to convert a bottled, liquid fruit-drink extract into a more convenient powder to be sealed into envelopes for ease of shipping and selling. Jell-O may have been the inspiration for this. Perkins came up with the right formula, process and package in 1927, in Hastings. With Kool-Aid (originally Kool-Ade), he could cease direct marketing his own wares and, as he put it, "launch Kool-Aid in the trade" via wholesalers.

The business grew despite, or perhaps because of, the Great Depression. In 1933 Perkins cut the price of an envelope of Kool-Aid from 10 cents to 5 and sold more than ever.

By this time he already had taken in a partner, former sales manager Fred Schmitt, and moved the business to Chicago in 1931. In 1953 he sold out to General Foods, makers of Jell-O. In 1989 General Foods merged with Kraft. Kool-Aid had moved from Hastings, Neb., to the very top of the food chain.

Edwin and Kitty Perkins, though, always had fond thoughts about Hastings and central Nebraska, and they acted on them. Among their charities in the region was Hastings College, to which they gave about $1.3 million. This included funding for construction of Perkins Library on campus.

The library houses an exhibit of Kool-Aid artifacts. I happened to ring up library director Robert Nedderman at a busy time. They were moving the Perkins printing press, on which Perkins printed his own labels in the early days, from one exhibit area to another. Nedderman says it "weighs as much as a Buick."

When Hastings organized a Kool-Aid Days festival in 1998 and got Gov. Ben Nelson to declare Kool-Aid the state soft drink, the press, regional and national, made sport of this. Some commentators thought Hastings was trying to pass itself off as a Happy Days town reliving the 1950s or some such innocent time.

Lighten up, folks, it's just fun. It's Kool-Aid, for pete's sake.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse, (701) 231-6136

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