How Wrigley started selling Juicy Fruit Gum Accidentally

There are many things we don’t know about Juicy Fruit Gum. What flavor it’s really supposed to be. Why it only lasts for 30 seconds. But something else no one questions about Juicy Fruit is where it came from in the first place.

It turns out the gum was actually a byproduct of the larger Wrigley business. William Wrigley Junior came to Chicago in 1891 with $32 and the idea to sell soap. His getting rich selling scouring soap scheme didn’t work out quite like he expected, and so he started incentivizing the sale of his soap with a bonus gift of baking soda. The problem for William Wrigley, Jr. is that the baking soda was far more popular than the soap itself. And we can all see where this is going.

William Wrigley Jr. eventually began to include packets of chewing gum as an incentive for buying cans of baking powder, and eventually the chewing gum business started to look more promising than the baking powder business, and in 1893 Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum was officially released, followed shortly thereafter by the spearmint variety.

That’s where the gum came from, but it wasn’t until World War II that the gum became cemented as a national brand. William Wrigley Junior’s successor Phillip K. Wrigley dedicated the entire output of the Wrigley plants to overseas troops during the war. This not only bought them points with the average American consumer, but many returning veterans never chewed another brand.

Wrigley went on to be well known for things like ownership of The Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field, the Wrigley Building, and being early adopters of technologies we take for granted such as the bar code. In fact the first product to be scanned for a UPC code was a ten pack of Wrigley’s gum. Although the iconic labeling might not be all that eye-catching these days, it’s certainly a familiar brand, and one with surprising origins.