Rachel Greenfield on Rose Knox and the story behind one of America's most iconic brands

Rachel, it's interesting that Knox gelatin, it seemed like for a long time was maybe out of style.

We no longer were doing the molds with the gelatin.

You say that there's a, a resurgence on social media of gelatinous things, uh, I suppose mostly desserts.

And actually, I bought my, the first box of Knox gelatin that I had purchased since I was probably a teenager just last summer when I was following a pana- panna cotta, uh-

Okay.

Yeah

... recipe, and I couldn't believe that it called for Knox gelatin.

I thought, "Isn't there something else?" But-

Yeah

...

I went to the grocery store.

Yeah.

There it was, looking very much the same as it probably did when Rose Knox took over the company in 1908.

Maybe a little different.

What is this resurgence?

Um, I think a lot of the, you know, there was a resurgence around aspic first, okay? And if you actually look on Facebook, there are some Facebook groups.

One is called Aspics with Threatening Auras, and that's all part of the social media, I wanna put up a picture of something really fun, right? So people put up pictures of aspic that they've made.

Some of them are beautiful.

Some of them have hotdog eyes and olive eyes and are look really sort of, um, threatening auras.

Um, but the other thing that's happened recently is this whole gelatin for dieting thing, and that is all over Instagram and TikTok, and it is actually not new at all.

In 1939, Rose Knox published a little booklet called Mrs. Knox's Be Fit, Not Fat.

And it has recipes that you can make with Knox gelatin for things that will be filling and low calorie and have a lot of protein in them, because Knox gelatin is 85% protein.

So it was back then marketed as being healthy for you.

They marketed around, it around vitamins and protein, and it still is.

So Mrs. Knox, actually, there was a Vogue Knox gelatin diet in the 1950s that was a multi-page spread in Vogue magazine.