Open two packages of gum and they might look almost identical.

Put them in your mouth, though, and they can be two completely different experiences.

I’ve been a gum chewer pretty much my whole life. I love gum. These days, gum has become a bit of a thing in our house too. My kids chew it, I chew it, and there’s usually somebody around here with a piece in their mouth.

If I’m working at my computer, driving, packing orders or completely hyper-focused on something, there’s a very good chance I’m chewing spruce gum.

But “natural gum” is a surprisingly slippery term.

A gum might use natural flavours while still containing a conventional gum base. Another might use chicle. Another might use mastic. Spruce gum is different again: the material being chewed is prepared tree resin.

So what actually separates natural chewing materials from regular commercial gum?

1. Start With the Part That Actually Makes It Gum

The biggest difference can be the base itself.

Modern commercial gum base can be formulated from combinations of elastomers, resins, waxes, softeners, fillers and other ingredients. Depending on the formulation, that can include synthetic polymers.

Natural chewing materials can instead begin with plant-derived substances such as chicle, mastic or tree resin.

That doesn’t mean every product with the word “natural” on it has a completely natural gum base. If that distinction matters to you, the ingredient list and the manufacturer’s description are worth reading.

If you want the deeper rabbit hole on this, we wrote an entire guide to what gum base is and what can be inside it.

2. Sweeteners Can Be Completely Different

Regular gum may contain sugar or sugar substitutes such as xylitol, sorbitol, aspartame or other sweeteners, depending on the product.

Natural gum doesn’t automatically mean sugar-free, either. Some natural-base gums are still sweetened and flavoured.

Our spruce gum is a different experience altogether. We don’t add sugar or artificial sweeteners. We aren’t trying to make tree resin taste like watermelon or peppermint.

It tastes like what it is.

A tree.

3. Gum Is Kind of a Thing in Our House

Because I’ve chewed gum for so much of my life, I pay a lot more attention to what happens in my mouth now than I ever used to.

And something happened with one of my teeth that really caught my attention.

I had a pretty bad cavity — an actual hole I could feel in one of my teeth. After I had been chewing spruce gum regularly for quite some time, I noticed I couldn’t feel that hole anymore. It seemed to have closed up.

And there is real science around chewing itself.

Chewing stimulates saliva. Saliva helps clear sugars and food debris, buffer acids in the mouth, and supplies calcium and phosphate involved in the natural remineralization of enamel.

Research on qualifying sugar-free chewing gums has also found reductions in dental-caries risk. Other research has examined effects on plaque and oral bacteria such as Streptococcus mutans.

That research does not establish that spruce resin repairs cavities. But my own tooth experience absolutely made me more interested in the relationship between chewing, saliva and the mouth.

My tooth is my experience.

The saliva research is science.

4. Texture Is Where the Difference Gets Obvious

Commercial chewing gum is incredibly consistent.

That’s one of the things modern manufacturing is very good at. Piece number one is supposed to feel like piece number twenty.

Trees did not get that memo.

Natural resin changes with the tree, age, temperature and condition of the resin. Prepared spruce gum can begin firmer, soften as it warms and vary somewhat from batch to batch.

After becoming accustomed to chewing resin, commercial gum feels incredibly soft to me now.

That’s obviously my opinion, not science.

But I cannot un-feel it.

5. Natural Gum Doesn’t Necessarily Mean One Ingredient

This is an important distinction.

Natural chewing gum is a category, not a single material.

Chicle comes from the sapodilla tree. Mastic comes from the mastic tree. Spruce resin comes from spruce trees. Products made with those materials can still have completely different ingredient lists, processing methods, flavours and textures.

Our gum is made primarily from wild-harvested spruce resin with a small amount of pine resin added to help create the chewing texture we want.

We personally harvest that resin from Canadian forests and prepare it ourselves in Alberta.

For me, knowing exactly where the material came from has become a huge part of the appeal.

6. What Happens After You’re Finished Chewing?

Then there’s the part nobody really thinks about until they step in it.

Gum gets stuck under desks, underneath tables, on sidewalks, benches and parking lots.

Conventional gums that contain persistent synthetic polymers can remain as litter rather than simply disappearing after somebody spits them onto the ground.

But I wouldn’t automatically assume that every gum marketed as “natural” is biodegradable either. The base and the complete formulation matter.

That’s another reason I think consumers should be asking what their gum is actually made from instead of relying on one word on the front of a package.

7. Is Natural Gum Better Than Regular Gum?

That depends on what you actually want from gum.

If you want something sweet, soft, strongly flavoured and almost identical every single time, commercial gum is extremely good at delivering that experience.

If you want to explore traditional chewing materials, simpler ingredient lists, plant-derived bases or actual tree resin, natural gum opens an entirely different door.

And natural doesn’t automatically mean healthier. Regular doesn’t automatically mean harmful. Even within both categories, formulations vary enormously.

The useful question is:

What am I actually chewing, and is that what I want?

Why I Ended Up Choosing Spruce Gum

I didn’t end up chewing spruce gum because I spent my life hating gum.

It was basically the opposite.

I just ended up wanting to know more about what I was chewing.

That question eventually led me backward through commercial gum, gum base, natural chewing materials and the history of chewing tree resins.

And somehow, after a lifetime of gum, I ended up chewing something people were chewing long before the modern gum aisle existed.

Resin from a tree.

Turns out gum can be a much bigger rabbit hole than it looks.