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Sep 18, 2024

Gum Chewing: No Longer Trending (We’re Just Spitballing Here)

Executives may be feeling kind of Wrigley

By Ed Goldman

Is the bubble-gum bubble over? America’s love affair with chewing-gum, a pastime since it was invented in 1869, appears to be on the wane, according to suppressed-panic comments from some of the treat’s largest makers.

“Mars Wrigley is spending millions of dollars in a bid to restore chewing-gum to its former glory with consumers,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “starting with an international ad campaign that jettisons typical category promises such as fresh breath or great taste.” 

Edgy Cartoon

Getting on the stick

It gets all New Age-y after that. “Mars is instead promoting its orbit and Extra gum brands through the lens of mindfulness, purporting that mastication can silence anxious thoughts, improve focus or boost confidence. ‘Quiet your mind mouth with Extra Gum,’ one ad concluded.”

As you’ve observed, the act of chewing chewing-gum has long been a staple both of baseball players and actors looking for a quick-and-easy character trait. Sometimes there’s a harmonic convergence: I have a vivid memory of then-actor Ronald Reagan—starring as pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander in the 1952 film “The Winning Team”—unwrapping stick after stick of gum and folding them into his mouth before a game as he chats with another player. (For sports buffs, during the course of his career Alexander played for the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals.) 

I have no idea if it was even a good movie. That scene might have stayed with me mainly because it aired every night for a week as the “Million Dollar Movie” on a Los Angeles TV station in the early 1960s. It’s also where I saw “The High and Mighty” and “Damn Yankees” five times each and from sheer repetition, decided they must be masterpieces.

In my teens, I chewed my share of gum but after a dozen or so chomps the sugar dissolved and it was akin to chewing silicon ear plugs. (In case you’re verifying my claim, silicon plugs were invented in 1962. I became a teenager the following year. So there.) I switched to a sugarless gum for about a week. Since this started out tasting like nothing it really had nowhere to go.

I’m not sure how, or whom, the world’s chewing-gum manufacturers are going to sell on the notion that working your jaw will do much more than enhance your saliva count. Equating mastication with mindfulness—which sounds slightly sexy until you remember that mastication just means chewing—may be a bit of a stretch. I do know from a biography of Irving Berlin I read as a boy that the prolific songwriter smoked cigarettes and chewed gum as he cranked out classics such as “White Christmas,” “God Bless America” and “Steppin’ Out With My Baby.” (I always thought the latter was called “Steppin’ Out On My Baby,” which would have made it one of those rare non-country hit songs about infidelity.) 

I so enjoyed reading about Irving Berlin’s work habit that when I decided to write my first song, I stuck two pieces of Dentyne in my cheeks, found and lit one of my dad’s Pall Mall cigarettes, then sat down at the very-used out-of-tune piano he’d picked up for us. I don’t remember if I ever finished writing that song. I got so ill from the cigarette that it’s all a blank to me now. I was 12.

“Global gum sales fell to $16.1 billion in 2020 from $19.5 billion the year prior,” according to that Journal report. I’m no expert but to me, that sounds like the industry is still raking it in. Maybe the worried execs should do what Reagan did in that baseball movie: shove a few sticks in their mouth and improve their pitching. It’s better than just masticating about it.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).