Jiggly Jello With Solid Wiggles' Jena Derman and Jack Schramm

Jell-O is one of the first solid foods a child eats and one of the last an elderly person can manage. It appears in military mess halls, hospital trays, and Ellis Island welcome meals. It is also, as Jenna Derman and Jack Schramm of Solid Wiggles demonstrate, a medium capable of remarkable precision, beauty, and flavor—if you know what you're doing.

From Pastry to Party: How Solid Wiggles Started

Derman came from a pastry background at Milk Bar, where she had been experimenting with gelatin as an artistic medium for weddings and gallery openings. In April 2020, Food & Wine ran a two-page spread on her work—just as the pandemic shut everything down. She was making non-alcoholic jellies using coconut water, limited by what flavors could stay clear. She reached out to Schramm, who had worked at Dave Arnold's Booker and Dax, for help clarifying juice. Schramm, then teaching Zoom bartending classes, showed up and immediately thought: "Let's put booze in them."

The company was not a calculated business move. "We didn't decide that," Derman says. "We made it because it was fun and immediately sold out, and then said let's do it one more time." They sold a thousand jelly eyeballs for Halloween 2020. "And then it's like, I guess we keep doing this and keep iterating."

The Mechanics of a Better Jelly