The Little-Known Story of How An Exiled President Became A Founding Father to A Stick-sized Mouth Watering Delight Favored the World Over
And the soap salesman that helped push it into a $48 billion industry (and emerged as the market leader)
You can trace its existence back to some 9,000 years ago when ancient Mayans used it as a way to quench thirst.
The Aztecs also used it too but followed certain rules. For instance, only children and single women could use it in public. Married women and widows could use it privately to freshen their breath, while men used it in secret to clean their teeth.
Primitive Europeans used it as medicine to treat toothaches.
The Greeks used it to clean their teeth.
Native American Indians took it with them on long haul fishing and hunting trips as a way to curb hunger.
While the ingredients used to make it have changed considerably over the centuries, chewing gum remains a confectionary-candy-like delight the world over.
The truth is some 374 million pieces are sold worldwide. If each piece were chewed for 30 minutes, that’s over 187 billion hours spent chewing gum.
We love gum so much, there are even contest centered around it.
There’s the how many pieces can you chew at once contest that Lester Cook won by chewing 250 pieces of gum at once.
Or stretching contests like the one Trevor Cummings won by stretching a single piece of gum 564 inches long.
And Richard Walker chewed 135 pieces for 8 hours, setting a world record.
Around 90 elementary school students and their parents set a Guinness world record in Sapporo Japan by making the world's largest piece of chewing gum.
The 1.1-meter-long, 30-cm-wide blueberry-flavored piece measured around 15 times the size of an ordinary stick of gum.
When the chewing gum industry got started, the little 3-inch stick sized pieces of candy weren’t very flavorful at all.
In fact you could say that tasted more like tree bark then sugary sweet.
It “Quieted” His Nerves
Sapodilla trees grow wild in the jungles of Mexico, Central and South America and deep in the Amazon.
And from those trees is a sap known as chicle. If you let that sap dry, you can chew it.
That’s what General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna did. In fact he was known to carry around pieces of chicle in his trouser pockets.
General Santa Anna isn’t a name familiar to most Americans, but he did do historical things. For instance, he fought the Spanish and led the Mexican army in the country’s fight for independence.
He often called himself the “Napoleon of the West,” because he won so many decisive battles.
He also fought Davy Crocket and Jim Bowie during the battle of Alamo. After winning, he moved his forces east toward the San Jacinto River.
But that’s where he ran into trouble.
His forces could not overtake the Texas army led by General Sam Houston. On April 21, 1836, General Santa Anna along with other surviving members of his unit were thrown in prison.
To calm his nerves, the General would pull out pieces of chicle from his pocket and chew on them.
One month later, on May 14, he signed the Treaty of Velasco, in which he agreed that Mexico would not take up arms against Texas. In 1837 after meeting with President Andrew Jackson, he was transported back to Mexico onboard the USS Pioneer.
He served as Mexico’s eighth president, returning to office 11 times, though more often as a dictator than an elected leader. He was in fact the most powerful man in Mexico.
But given too much power, you sometimes do things that the citizens of your country don’t like or want. In General Santa Anna’s case, in 1853 he decided to sell millions of acres of land, known as the Gadsden Purchase to the United States.
That united opposition against him and just as Napoleon was exiled, so too was General Santa Anna. He wound up living in Jamaica for a few years and oddly enough, made his way to Staten Island.
A Suitcase full of Gum
One of the things that the General packed in his suitcase was a pile of chicle. And he a had plan for it too.
You see at the time; the U.S. was in the midst of a rubber boom.
If he could find someone who could turn the chicle into rubber, he could become the founding father of a rubber empire. And that also would allow him to raise enough money to buy his way back into Mexico.
Well as luck would have it, General Santa Anna found someone: Thomas Adams who just happened to be a glassmaker and inventor.
The two would become partners in their new rubber venture, with General Santa Anna supply the materials and Adams creating a new type of latex product.
Thomas Adams diligently experimented with chicle for over a year but unfortunately had no luck in converting into a rubber based product. Turns out there was no way to harden the chicle.
The General of course wasn’t happy. Of the many ways you could describe General Santa Anna, having patience wasn’t one of them.
Since Mr. Adams wasn’t able to convert the chicle into rubber, General Santa Anna lost interest in the endeavor. In fact he skipped out of the deal entirely, leaving Adams with a warehouse full of chicle.
Now Thomas Adams was left with a problem … what to do with all of the chicle. Call it fate or divine intervention, but when Mr. Adams happened to stop in a drug store one day to pick up a few items, he noticed a little girl buying a type of chewing candy made of paraffin wax.
Adams realized the paraffin wax had no flavor and over time became brittle. And so that sparked an idea … what if he used chicle as a better replacement? Afterall, he saw General Santa Anna chew on and knew that it lasted longer than wax.
Returning back to his warehouse, Adams went to work creating small chicle balls. In 1859, he began selling his chewing balls to those people living in his local community. It was an instant hit. He sold out his entire first batch.
Knowing he was onto something people liked and were willing to buy, Thomas Adams founded the American Chicle Company. Eventually he began selling his gum across the country.
The Gum Ball Wars
In business when you do something great other companies aim to copy your success. That’s why there are several versions of products offered by different corporations.
And since Adams’ gum was selling well, other companies want in. And thus chewing companies were popping up around the country.
Everyone was battling for a piece of the gum market.
For example, John Curtis set up a chewing gum factory in Portland, Maine. He would boil spruce tree resin, turning into a gum-like substance. Then he coated the strips in cornstarch to prevent them from sticking together. Then he began selling his gum state-wide.
Then there’s William F. Semple, a dentist from Mount Vernon, Ohio, who filed patent number 98,304 on 28 December 1869 for his version of chewing gum. Mr. Semple's gum was intended to clean teeth and strengthen the chewer's jaw. It was not a sweet treat as the ingredients included chalk and powdered licorice root.
However one became known as “king of chewing gum” and also was one of the wealthiest men in America. That man was William Wrigley Jr.
But Mr. Wrigley did not start out as a gum maker. Nope, he was a salesman working for his father in his hometown of Philadelphia. William Wrigley sold households item such as baking powder, rubber stamps and newspapers.
Sometime in 1891, he moved to Chicago in hopes of expanding the company’s base. Besides being a very good salesman, Mr. Wrigley was also a gifted marketer. He understood that one way to increase sales is to offer free incentives to buyers.
And he also knew that if the incentive you offered was considered a popular item, then you could dramatically increase sales.
One of the incentives he offered to customers who purchased soap was a free can of baking powder. He quickly realized that his customers were more interested in the baking powder, so he focused on selling that particular item.
And he did quite well too. Using the same free incentive strategy, he then began offering baking powder customers a free pack of gum. He found out rather fast that those customers preferred the chewing gum.
Bet It All on the Gum
It’s then that William Wrigley realized that he should focus his attention on selling chewing gum instead of household products. So in 1891 he partnered with a local manufacturer and founded The Wrigley Company.
The first two brands of gum he produced were called Lotta and Vassar. While the names are a little odd, people loved the gum for its spearmint flavor.
Wrigley knew that in order to gain more gum customers, he’d be better of focusing on retail outlets … in other words the places his customers shopped. He thus began offering retailers free perks like display cases or coffee grinders if they’d put his gum in their stores.
That strategy worked and his little gum business was growing. In 1893, he debuted the Juicy Fruit brand of chewing gum at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. It was a huge success.
Unfortunately not everything isn’t always “roses and gold.” At one point his factory burned down and he had to start all over again. Then he almost went bankrupt when he invested heavily into advertising.
But in 1907 when the country experienced its first financial panic, advertisers dropped their rates drastically. Mr. Wigley could now afford to buy more advertising space, which allowed him to reach a whole new level of success.
Many of the ads he ran focused on the health benefits of chewing gum … how it could soothe a nervous stomach or ease a stressed-out mind. By 1908, sales of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum were more than $1,000,000 a year.
Because the chewing gum field had grown crowded with competitors, Wrigley decided he’d make his products stand out by creating a free giveaway campaign. In 1915, the Wrigley Company sent free samples of its gum to every household listed in every phone book. That amounted to over 1.5 million pieces of gum.
Now everyone, everywhere knew the name of Wrigley gum.
Many marketing experts say that by doing that mailing campaign, Mr. Wrigley accidentally invented direct marketing. In fact The Wrigley Company became one of the largest advertisers in the U.S.
In 1925, Mr. Wrigley turned the company presidency over to his son, Philip, and became chairman of the board. By then it had factories in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
William Wrigley died on January 26, 1932, at his home in Phoenix. He was 70 years old.
In 1999, William Beau Wrigley Jr. took over the business his great-grandfather started in 1891. Wrigley Jr. expanded the company in 2005 by purchasing Altoids and Life Savers from Kraft Foods for $1.46 billion.
The Wrigley Company remained a privately owned company until 2008, when it was bought by another family owned business, Mars Company for $23 million.
Today, Wrigley gum dominates the chewing gum market that has grown into a $48 billion industry. Wrigley hauls in over $1.2 billion in sales for its sugar-free gum and $247 million on regular gum
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“Competition is a good thing … it forces us to do our best.” — Nancy Pearcey