Company really took off, but by the time he died in , Wrigley was one of the richest men in the nation. The average American chewed sticks of gum a year by the s, creating a massive demand for chicle.
As the fortunes of Adams, Wrigley and other chewing gum magnates surged, many Latin American communities would soon pay the price:. As is often the case, human appetites outmatched nature's resources. Unsustainable harvesting methods used to increase yields killed at least a quarter of Mexico's sapodilla trees by the mids, and scientists predicted total forest depletion within four decades.
Fortunately for the trees but unfortunately for Latin American economies , chewing gum manufacturers soon began switching to cheaper, synthetic bases made from petroleum, wax and other substances.
By , the United States was no longer importing any chicle from Mexico. But chicle may be staging a small comeback. In Britain this year , a small Mexican company called Chicza just launched what it is marketing as "the world's first biodegradable chewing gum. If not, I expect to see it soon. For instance, the Maya were known to chew on the sap of the sapodilla or chicozapote tree and in Ancient Greece, people chewed on the sap of the mastic tree.
It is speculated that this practice has existed in different parts of the world since the Neolithic period. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a Mexican politician who was exiled to the United States is said to have brought with him something called chicle - a resin derived from the Sapodilla tree, traditionally chewed by Native Americans. Over the years, manufacturers replaced chicle with other substances that were easier to procure. After moving to Chicago in , he began offering store owners incentives to stock his products, such as free cans of baking powder with every order.
When the baking powder proved a bigger hit than the soap, Wrigley sold that instead, and added in free packs of chewing gum as a promotion. In , the Wrigley Company kicked off a campaign in which it sent free samples of its gum to millions of Americans listed in phone books.
Another promotion entailed sending sticks of gum to U. Competition also played a role in the development of bubble gum. Frank Fleer, whose company had made chewing gum since around , wanted something different from his rivals and spent years working on a product that could be blown into bubbles. In , he concocted a bubble gum he called Blibber-Blubber, but it proved to be too sticky. He never sold his gum on the mainstream market, however, leaving plenty of room for New Yorker Thomas Adams to do the job.
When Americans began to import chicle, sap harvested from the sapodilla tree from the rain forests of Central America, the gum industry took another evolutionary step. Next comes the first big name in the history of chewing gum story: William Wrigley, Jr.
Wrigley, who was selling soap and scouring products at the time, saw the huge potential in the chewing gum industry and used his deft marketing skills to make a name for himself and his company, which introduced Wrigley Spearmint Gum in While there were 12 other gum companies in the U.
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