When raw resin customers first started asking me if I could make spruce gum, I wasn't thinking about the history of the chewing-gum industry.

I was thinking, Okay... how hard could this be? I was already a master at clarifying sheets of resin for my customers for years....

Turns out: pretty hard.

My first attempt using just spruce resin basically broke apart like sand in my mouth. So Ron and I started experimenting.

Spruce. Pine. Beeswax for a while. Different resin textures. Different ratios. Batches that behaved beautifully and batches that absolutely did not.

Eventually we figured out what worked for us.

Only later did I start digging into the history and realize something that completely changed how I looked at what we were making:

Spruce gum wasn't just an old thing people occasionally chewed in the forest.

For a period of North American history, it was an actual industry.

Before Spruce Gum Was a Product

The commercial story didn't begin with a factory.

Indigenous peoples in northern North America were chewing spruce resin long before European settlers began selling it. Historical accounts from Maine specifically document Wabanaki use of spruce resin as a chewing substance, alongside other practical uses for the resin.

European settlers adopted the practice.

That matters, because the commercial spruce-gum story wasn't somebody suddenly inventing the idea of chewing spruce. It was a much older practice being turned into a packaged product.

Then John B. Curtis Put Spruce Gum on Store Shelves

In 1848, John Bacon Curtis of Maine began producing what he called State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum.

According to the Maine State Archives' history of spruce gum, Curtis and his father experimented with spruce resin on their kitchen stove. Curtis then went from store to store trying to sell the finished gum.

I have to admit, this part makes me smile.

Take a forest material into the kitchen. Experiment until it behaves. Make something people can actually chew. Then try to convince somebody to buy it.

Apparently some parts of small business haven't changed that much since 1848.

That is the part I think gets lost when people hear the words “spruce gum.”

It sounds tiny. Rustic. Maybe something one person made beside a wood stove.

And yes, it started that way.

But it scaled.

There Was an Actual Spruce-Gum Economy

Maine became a major centre of chewing-gum production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and spruce was an important part of that story.

Resin had to come from somewhere. It had to be found, collected, purchased, sorted, processed, packaged and sold.

In other words, once people wanted enough spruce gum, an entire chain formed between the forest and the person chewing it.

That's especially interesting to me now because I stand on both ends of that chain.

Ron and I are the people walking through the bush looking for resin, and we're also the people processing it, packing it and sending the finished gum to customers.

When you do both, you become very aware of something industrial manufacturing hates:

I've stood there with resin from the same general area behaving completely differently from another batch.

One is hard. Another is soft. One snaps. Another stretches. Some resin practically tells you what it wants to become. Other resin apparently wakes up and chooses violence.

That's funny when you're making a batch in Alberta.

It's a much bigger problem when you're trying to build an enormous standardized chewing-gum industry.

Spruce Gum Had a Consistency Problem Before “Consistency” Was Even the Goal

Early commercial spruce-gum makers experimented with their products, including flavour, because raw spruce gum could be strong and bitter.

But flavour was only part of the bigger industrial problem.

Natural forest materials vary.

Anyone who works directly with resin learns that quickly. The tree, age of the resin, weather, temperature, moisture and the character of an individual piece can all change what you have in your hands.

Modern consumers eventually came to expect something very different from packaged chewing gum: the same texture, the same sweetness, the same flavour and essentially the same chew every time they opened a pack.

Spruce resin could be made into commercial gum.

It already had been.

But the chewing-gum industry was about to discover materials that were much easier to turn into the kind of enormous, standardized product category it was becoming.

Then Chicle Changed the Game

Chicle — the natural latex of the sapodilla tree — had been chewed in Mesoamerica long before it entered the United States chewing-gum industry.

In the nineteenth century, Thomas Adams experimented with chicle and ultimately began using it to make chewing gum.

Chicle was softer and better suited to the style of gum the growing industry wanted to manufacture. Other materials, including paraffin, were also used as chewing gum evolved.

The market was changing.

Spruce gum had helped establish commercial chewing gum in the United States, but it was no longer the easiest material around which to build the next generation of the industry.

The Maine State Archives sums up the eventual problem pretty neatly: cheaper, softer and easier-to-mass-produce ingredients transformed the market.

Spruce gum faded from mainstream production.

From Trees to Factories

What happened next is basically the story of modern chewing gum.

Chicle became enormously important. Gum companies grew. Brands became national and eventually international. Manufacturing became increasingly standardized.

Over time, synthetic materials also became part of modern gum-base technology, reducing the industry's dependence on naturally harvested latexes and resins.

By then, chewing gum had moved a long way from somebody collecting resin in the forest.

And from a manufacturing perspective, that makes perfect sense.

If you're making millions of pieces of gum, variability is the enemy.

If you're making spruce gum from actual tree resin, variability is part of the material.

Those are two completely different manufacturing philosophies.

A Tiny Timeline of a Very Big Shift

The Part I Didn't Expect to Find

When we started making spruce gum, I wasn't trying to recreate the nineteenth-century chewing-gum industry.

I didn't have an old spruce-gum recipe sitting beside me.

I had resin.

I had customers asking for gum.

And I had a first attempt that disintegrated in my mouth.

So we figured it out the way we figure out most things around here: try it, pay attention to what the material is doing, change something and try again.

That's why discovering the commercial history afterward was so interesting.

The problems weren't theoretical anymore.

I already knew spruce could be stubborn.

I already knew why somebody making gum would want elasticity.

I already knew why consistency becomes difficult when your starting material grew on a tree instead of arriving from a factory with identical specifications every time.

History suddenly made a lot more sense once I had resin stuck to my own hands.

Spruce Gum Lost the Mass Market. It Didn't Disappear.

That's the distinction I think matters.

Spruce gum didn't vanish because humans suddenly stopped being able to chew spruce resin.

The commercial chewing-gum industry changed around it.

Other materials were cheaper, softer, easier to manufacture at scale and better suited to producing a highly consistent product.

So spruce gum went from being part of the early commercial chewing-gum story to something far more niche.

More than a century later, though, Ron and I can still walk into an Alberta forest, collect resin, bring it home and turn it into something recognizable as chewing gum.

The funny part is that when customers first asked us to make it, I thought we were figuring out something weird.

And once you know that history, a little piece of spruce gum doesn't look quite so strange anymore.

It looks like something that was there near the beginning.