For most of human history, if you wanted something to chew, you didn't need a gum factory.

You needed a tree.

Spruce resin. Chicle. Mastic. Birch pitch.

People in different parts of the world discovered different chewable materials growing around them, and humans were chewing tree resins and natural gums thousands of years before brightly wrapped sticks of peppermint gum existed.

So how did we get from chewing something harvested from a tree to buying gum made around a manufactured gum base?

And once it became an enormous industry, the things manufacturers needed from gum changed too.

Chewing Gum Was Natural Long Before “Natural Gum” Was a Category

Calling tree-resin gum “alternative gum” is actually kind of funny when you look at the timeline.

The trees were here first.

Ancient Greeks chewed mastic. Maya and Aztec peoples used chicle from the sapodilla tree. Archaeological discoveries show people chewing birch pitch thousands of years ago. In northern North America, Indigenous peoples chewed spruce resin long before commercial spruce-gum companies existed.

We explored those traditions more broadly in Natural Chewing Gum Around the World.

The important part here is that chewing plant materials wasn't some modern wellness trend.

It was simply what chewing gum was before chewing gum became a manufactured global product.

Spruce Gum Became a Real Commercial Industry

Spruce gum wasn't limited to somebody wandering through the woods and popping resin into their mouth.

By the nineteenth century, it became commercial.

According to the Maine State Archives, John B. Curtis began selling State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum in 1848 after experimenting with spruce resin at home with his father.

By 1852, Curtis & Son had opened a chewing-gum factory. The Maine State Archives says the company employed around 200 people and produced about 1,800 boxes of gum per day.

Think about that for a second.

Spruce gum wasn't an obscure historical curiosity.

People were manufacturing it at serious commercial scale more than 170 years ago.

We tell that story in more detail in The Spruce Gum Industry Before Modern Chewing Gum Took Over.

Then Chicle Changed the Gum Business

Spruce had a problem if your goal was to turn chewing gum into a gigantic standardized industry.

It could be hard. It could be bitter. Natural resin varied.

Chicle offered manufacturers another option.

Chicle is a natural latex collected from the sapodilla tree of Mexico and Central America. Maya and Aztec peoples had used it long before North American gum manufacturers entered the picture.

In the nineteenth century, Thomas Adams began experimenting with chicle. His original goal wasn't chewing gum at all — he reportedly tried to use it as an industrial rubber substitute.

That didn't work out.

Chewing it did.

Adams began producing chicle-based gum, and the material became enormously important to the growing chewing-gum industry.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gum was no longer just a regional product made from whatever chewable resin grew nearby.

It was becoming mass-market consumer goods.

Gum Got Huge

This is where the scale of the story changes.

William Wrigley Jr. helped turn chewing gum into a heavily marketed national product. Smithsonian's history of chewing gum notes that by the 1920s the average American was chewing 105 sticks of gum per year.

That's a lot of chewing material.

Once millions of people expect gum to be inexpensive, widely available and basically identical every time they open a package, sourcing becomes a completely different problem.

Natural Gum Bases Had Limits

The problem wasn't that tree-derived chewing materials suddenly stopped working.

They obviously worked. People had been chewing them for generations.

The problem was industrial scale.

Chicle had to be harvested from sapodilla trees. Spruce resin had to be collected. Natural materials could vary. Supply was tied to forests, labour and geography.

Smithsonian's account describes the enormous demand placed on chicle-producing regions as the North American gum industry expanded. It also notes that destructive harvesting practices damaged sapodilla populations in Mexico during the industry's boom.

Meanwhile, spruce gum had already been losing ground to ingredients that were cheaper, softer and easier to mass produce, according to the Maine State Archives.

The direction of travel was pretty clear.

Gum companies needed a base that could keep up with gum factories.

Enter Modern Gum Base

Modern chewing gum doesn't have one universal recipe.

“Gum base” is the name for the insoluble chewing component, and manufacturers use proprietary formulations.

Modern gum-base ingredients can include natural materials as well as synthetic polymers, waxes and softening ingredients.

The International Chewing Gum Association says synthetic gum-base ingredients offer manufacturers advantages including consistency, texture and long-lasting flavour support. It also says natural polymers suitable for chewing gum production are available in limited quantities.

In other words, the industrial advantages are not difficult to understand.

Manufacturers wanted enormous amounts of gum that behaved predictably.

Synthetic materials helped them do that.

If you want to go down that rabbit hole, we've already covered what modern gum base actually is and the question “Is chewing gum plastic?” separately.

It Wasn't One Day When Everybody Stopped Using Trees

History is usually messier than that.

There wasn't a meeting where the world's gum makers all agreed:

Okay everyone, trees are cancelled.

Different natural materials rose and declined at different times. Formulations changed. Manufacturers experimented. Synthetic ingredients became increasingly useful as chewing gum industrialized.

And natural gum bases never vanished completely.

Chicle is still used in some gums today. Mastic is still chewed. Spruce gum is still made.

But those products became small compared with the scale of mainstream chewing gum.

The Entire History in About 30 Seconds

And Somehow We Ended Up Back at the Trees

This is the part of the history that makes me laugh a little.

When customers first asked me to make spruce gum, I wasn't trying to resurrect a nineteenth-century industry.

I was already working with spruce resin.

People asked if I could make it chewable.

So I tried.

My first pure-spruce attempt basically broke apart like sand in my mouth.

Ron and I started experimenting with spruce, pine, beeswax, different ratios and different batches of resin. Eventually we removed the beeswax, increased the spruce and settled on using a small amount of pine resin for elasticity.

Only later did I really appreciate how old the thing we were making actually was.

More than a century before Alberta Wildcraft existed, people were building businesses around spruce gum.

And long before those businesses existed, people were already chewing resin.

Modern Gum Didn't Make Tree Gum Obsolete

It made it niche.

Those aren't the same thing.

Modern gum base solved problems that mattered enormously to industrial manufacturers.

Tree resin solves a completely different problem for me:

I want to know what I'm chewing.

I don't need our gum to be identical to a piece produced by a factory.

I don't want it to be.

I know natural resin can vary because Ron and I are the ones walking through Alberta forests harvesting it.

We've dealt with resin that's hard, soft, brittle, sticky and everything in between.

That variability is one of the exact reasons industrial gum moved away from materials like this.

It's also part of what makes working with them interesting.

From Forest to Factory — and Back Again

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that modern gum manufacturing is extremely good at what it was built to do.

It can make vast quantities of consistent gum, in endless flavours and formats, and distribute it around the world.

But somewhere during that transformation, it became easy to forget where the idea of chewing gum came from in the first place.

It didn't begin in a factory.

It began with people discovering that certain materials from trees were satisfying to chew.

Spruce.

Mastic.

Chicle.

Birch pitch.

Different trees. Different places. Same wonderfully human idea:

Can I chew that?