which would within a few years transform it into the dominant US packaged grocery products manufacturer.

It began late that year with the purchase of the Jell-O Company. Jell-O had been first produced in 1897 by Pearle Bixby Wait, a carpenter from the town of LeRoy in northern New York state. Mr. Wait's product was based upon a patent that had been issued to inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper in 1845, but which Cooper