How Do We Make Chewing Gum?

Chewing gum is made from a gum base, corn syrup, sugar and flavouring. The gum base keeps it chewy in hours. For making bubble gum, still, a more rubbery gum base is called for so that it will stretch without tearing.

The recipe of each manufacturer a secret. The method of manufacturing is common to all, there may however be slight deviations depending on the recipe and requirements of the targeted standard of the final product. At the factory, a gum base is prepared. The materials are melted, and sterilised in a steam cooker and pumped through a centrifuge. This machine spins at high speed and throws out dirt and bits of bark found in the rain gums.

The clean, melted gum base is mixed with sugar, corn syrup, and flavouring. The usual mixture is 20 per cent gum base, 63 per cent sugar and 16 per cent corn syrup, and about, 1 per cent flavouring are spearmint, peppermint, clove, cinnamon.

While the mass is still warm, it is run between pairs of rollers. The rollers thin down the material into a long ribbon. Powdered sugar on both sides prevents the gun from sticking. The knives are fitted with last rollers which cut the ribbon into sticks. Machines wrap the sticks separately and then into packages.

Most of the gum base manufactured and now used is a product of industry. But, chicle comes from the wild sapodilla tree, of Guatemala and Mexico. The milky white sap of this tree is collected in buckets, boiled and moulded into about 11 kgs block, and shipped to chewing gum factories.

In Central America, people chew chuckle right from the tree. People in New England chewed spruce gum, as the Indians did. This was the first gun sold in the United States in years 1800’s. Chickle was first imported in the 1860s to substitute rubber.

In about the year 1890 it began to be used in making chewing gum. Since then it is being used in the modern chewing gum industry.