Gummy vitamins may be a better precedent, according to Jetton. Avid Health, based just north of Portland, in Vancouver, Washington, figured out how to infuse gummy bears with vitamins; in 2012, Church & Dwight Co., maker of Trojan condoms and Nair hair remover, bought Avid for $650 million.
Other entrepreneurs are chasing gelatin gold in more traditional ways. In October, Los Angeles-based Ludlows Cocktail Co. started selling pre-packaged “Jelly Shots.” The five flavors, which include Fresh Lime Margarita, Planter’s Punch, and Meyer Lemon Drop, are all natural, and upscale. They sell for $9.99 to $12.49 for a package of five. No refrigeration is necessary. They’re formulated to be jiggly at room temperature.
Until Ludlows, no one had re-invented the Jello shot, says co-founder Freya Estreller. A rival called Liquor Gelz, makes ready-to-eat shots look like neon apple sauce packs compared with the pastel tones of Ludlows’s.
The first person to ever do a gelatin shot, loosely defined, may have been Antonin Careme, the Frenchman who baked Napoleon's wedding cake. According to Ian Kelly’s Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carame, the First Celebrity Chef, Carame, a devotee of complex cuisine, devised a recipe called “Orange-Flower and Pink Champagne Jelly” that called for isinglass, a collagen extracted from the dried swim bladders of beluga sturgeon. Much later, according to Jetton, soldiers used innocent looking Jello shots to get contraband booze onto base.
Estreller’s Jelly Shots are proving especially popular with women. “Moms are obsessed,” she says. “They sneak them in their purses everywhere. They take them to soccer games.” One Facebook post showed a mom nibbling one at Chuck E. Cheese's.
Estreller says she likes Jevo’s shots. She tasted them at the Nightclub & Bar Show in Las Vegas in March. “They’re sweeter than mine,” she says. “They have a really good texture.”