- [Narrator] It's a multicolored treat you can play with,
and it fuels a $20 billion a year global industry,
with nearly 100,000 tons
sold every year.
- [Vallery] The beauty of bubblegum,
most kids are gonna be able to save up enough money
to go and buy a piece of bubble gum.
It puts everyone on the same playing field.
- [Narrator] But before bubbles,
gum was something else entirely.
- [Erin] Advertisements said that gum
could help with your digestion, calm your nerves.
- [Jason] The colors were a little blander.
- [Vallery] It was white and beige.
It was very utilitarian.
- [Narrator] Until a group of mavericks blow it up.
[intense music]
[bubblegum popping]
- Well, that' incredible.
How do you do that?
- [Narrator] And unlikely innovators.
- I've been working on the bubblegum.
- [Jason] It's so wild, right.
The accountant found the magic ingredient.
- [Narrator] Create a modern day gold rush.
- It's pink gold.
[intense music]
- I'm telling you,
this is what we gotta be selling.
[intense music]
- [Vallery] They've pulled out all the stops with the
packaging, with the marketing.
- [Narrator] Transforming crude experiments.
- What do you think? - It looks great.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] Into household names.
- What did you say you call this?
- Big League Chew.
- [Narrator] And creating an entirely new consumer category.
- [Jason] Bubblegum is the amusement park of food.
They influenced how people perceived kids
as a marketplace.
- [Adam] This is where gum became a candy,
and now confection in America will never be the same again.
[intense music]
[dramatic music]
- [Narrator] It's the early 1900s,
and chewing gum use is on the rise in America.
- [Jason] The chewing gum landscape at the time
was just wildly dominated by Adams Gum and Wrigley's.
These guys had the stores, they had the branding,
they had the resources, the advertising.
- [Narrator] But the gum is very different
than what we know today.
- [Jason] The colors were a little blander.
They had flavors we wouldn't necessarily think about in gum.
Yes, there was mint,
but there were also things like violet, licorice gum,
flavors that we don't so much embrace these days.
- Gum was for adults.
It was practical.
You chew it for cleaner breath, or to help with digestion.
You know, it wasn't for kids.
- [Jason] You could look at gum as a parallel
to like toothpaste today.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] But in Philadelphia,
a regional gum manufacturer
is looking to do the nearly impossible,
break through in a market
dominated by two industry titans.
- [Jason] The Fleer company was founded by Frank Fleer in 1885,
and it was primarily a chewing gum company.
Wrigley and Adams, they're going gangbusters,
and Frank Fleer is looking to innovate,
he's trying to figure out where's the white space, right.
What's the territory that Wrigley and Adams don't have?
- [Erin] It's hard to stand out
in the chewing gum market at that time.
It's hard to break through
if you don't have something different.
- [Narrator] Fleer looks to another market
that's recently taken off for inspiration.
- [Susan] When candy came around after the Civil War
and all of these fun candies, fizzy candies, hard candies,
it was really important
because they were made for an uncapped universe of people
who are working class kids.
- [Vallery] I mean, the beauty on penny candy, like cheap
candy, it's something that most kids can enjoy, you know.
You're not gonna get priced out of it.
- [Narrator] While kids are buying up candy,
chewing gum at the time is not being made for them.
- So Frank Fleer decides he's going to create
the first gum for kids.
- [Narrator] After months of tinkering,
Fleer has a new product
that he's finally ready to present
to his distributors.
- I've got something to show you.
- At that time, Frank Fleer had young children.
I'm sure he observed their behavior.
[intense music]
- May I present,
[intense music]
Blibber-Blubber.
It's gum, but it's not like any other gum.
It's designed for children to play with.
- [Jason] It's hard to imagine now
because we look at kids as such a viable consumer category,
but back then kids were really an afterthought.
So for Frank Fleer to look at that category of consumer,
that was a pretty innovative way of thinking.
- Let me show you.
[intense music]
- Whoa.
- [Erin] So in making this,
Fleer has created the first gum
that's meant to be played with,
and bubbles to be blown with and to be snapped,
like he's invented bubblegum.
- [Jason] Bubblegum comes into a world
where blowing bubbles with gum doesn't exist.
- [Narrator] Fleer's invention
births an entirely new food category,
which will one day sell nearly $8 billion a year.
And it's the beginning of an iconic brand
that will churn out 1.5 billion pieces every day,
and become a staple of party gift bags
and Halloween candy bowls.
But first, they'll have to get it out into the world.
[intense music]
- Try it for yourself.
- [Erin] It's really weird to have to articulate
how to blow a bubble.
- Gently just blow air into it
like you're blowing up a balloon.
[intense music]
- I feel like when you chew gum these days,
it's just something that happens naturally.
You just kind of do it, like we're used to it.
- That's one small problem I gotta work out,
it's a little sticky.
A little bit of turpentine, it'll be fine.
- [Adam] But the big fatal flaw is this,
it basically adheres very strongly
to whatever it sticks on.
So strongly in fact, it takes turpentine to remove it.
- [Jason] Blibber-Blubber, yeah, it's chewy.
You know you can blow little bubbles with it,
but boy, do not mess with it,
because it's gonna mess you up.
[footsteps thudding]
- [Narrator] Ignoring the concerns of his distributors,
Fleer releases Blibber-Blubber in 1906.
- [Erin] So Blibber-Blubber comes out
and then almost immediately is pulled back.
Orders are cut.
Nobody's interested in this sticky stuff.
- [Narrator] Over the next two decades,
Fleer will give up on the idea of bubblegum,
shelving Blibber-Blubber and even gum itself,
focusing on candy.
[intense music]
And in 1921, Frank Fleer passes away.
- [Adam] The man who created bubblegum
never lived to see it become the phenomenon that it is now.
And upon his passing,
he bequeathed the company to his son-in-law,
Gilbert Mustin in 1921.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] Five years after Fleer's death,
business has slowed and Mustin
is struggling to keep the company afloat.
Desperate for a hit,
Mustin revisits an idea from the company's past.
- [Erin] Even though Blibber-Blubber was a massive
failure, it actually became part of the Fleer family lore,
and they just couldn't let that idea die.
They knew that the concept of bubblegum for kids had legs,
they just had to figure out how to make it work.
- [Justin] But try as he might,
Mustin really can't crack the formula.
- [Adam] Enter Walter Diemer.
He's the young accountant at Fleer.
- Sir, are you ready to look at the projections
for next quarter? - Not today, Walter.
- [Adam] Now he's privy to all of these attempts and
experiments in trying to create bubblegum,
because his office is essentially in the same room
where the food lab is.
- Still not having any luck.
- This whole thing's a failure.
Yeah. [paper crackling]
- [Narrator] As the accountant,
Diemer knows the financial struggles Fleer is facing.
- [Jason] He's not a food scientist, he's not a chemist,
but you know, he sees what Mustin is doing.
He sees the experimenting, and he's intrigued, right.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] After hours, Diemer experiments with solutions
for a new bubblegum recipe.
- [Adam] Even if he volunteered, no one would take him seriously
because what could an accountant
possibly know about bubblegum?
But he knows there's something there
and he believes he has what it takes to crack the code.
- [Jason] Diemer, he's just a guy who's tinkering, right?
There's ingredients, there's things around.
And so, this is the effort of a hobbyist, right,
a guy who is curious.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] He begins experimenting
with a unique substance
derived from the sap of a tree
found in Southeast Asia.
It isn't known for food,
but for a type of rubber.
- [Adam] He adds latex to the bubblegum base,
and suddenly you have something stretchy, something pliable,
and something that won't stick to you.
- [Jason] So the accountant, right.
It's so wild.
He found the magic ingredient.
- [Narrator] After weeks of experimentation,
Diemer is ready to present his new recipe to Mustin.
- Walter. - Sir.
I have something to show you.
I've been working on the bubblegum.
[board banging]
- You've been working on it?
- Yes. And I think I've cracked it.
[intense music]
- [Jason] Mustin had to see the opportunity
that was now in front of him,
this thing he wasn't able to solve.
He said, "Oh, now we're onto something.
Now we can start cooking."
[intense music]
So Diemer and Mustin now have this prototype,
you know, bubblegum, but it's still gray.
It's like a lot of the chewing gums out there,
and they wanna stand out, right.
They wanna stand apart.
- We need to have some colors.
[banging]
- [Beth] As humans, we eat with our eyes.
When consumer products
were typically given a color,
it was a visual cue to let the consumer know
what that product taste like, right.
- [Narrator] So Mustin looks to see what color dyes
they have in stock.
- All we have is pink.
[intense music]
Yes.
- [Jason] So what's great about this sort of accidental
color choice for bubblegum
is that really in the confectionary space,
there wasn't necessarily a flavor associated with pink.
You know, there weren't ham lozenges out there, right?
True to this day,
if you think about bubblegum, you think about pink.
But bubblegum wasn't pink
because of some natural ingredient.
It was just because that's the dye
they had in the lab that day.
- [Narrator] While they figured out the texture and color,
there's still one major aspect
they need to solve, flavor.
-[Vallery] At this time,
colors had very specific associations with flavor.
So red was cherry,
yellow was lemon,
orange was orange,
but pink didn't have any association.
- [Narrator] To create one,
Mustin uses what they have on hand.
- [Jeff] It's a concoction.
You have pineapple, banana, cloves,
cinnamon, wintergreen in some formulation
that creates most of the bubblegum flavors that we know.
- [Jason] It's really funny, when you think about it,
nature decided what purple tastes like, right.
It's grape.
Nature decided what orange tastes like,
tastes like oranges.
Nature did not decide what pink flavor is, right.
It was these guys at Fleer,
and that's bubblegum, baby.
- [Narrator] In 1928, Fleer once again prepares
to introduce the world to bubblegum.
[intense music]
- [Adam] Because the bubbles it blows
are twice the size of Blibber-Blubber,
they name this bubblegum Dubble Bubble.
- [Narrator] With Dubble Bubble,
Fleer gives America their first taste of bubblegum
as we know it,
but they won't be alone for long.
A whole new wealth of rivals will soon look
to put their own unique spins on chew creation.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] In December of 1928, Dubble Bubble hits the
shelves of local Philadelphia candy stores.
Priced at just once sent a piece,
and packaged unlike any other chewing gum.
- Wrigley's Gum comes in sticks.
So it's very flat.
It's marketed to adults.
Dubble Bubble is totally different
than regular chewing gum
in size, shape, texture, and color.
- [Jason] So the shape of Dubble Bubble
are these little cylindrical little chunks,
and the reason why they do that
is they've got a taffy machine
and that's where they feed the gum base through,
and then they're able to chop it off in bite-size sections.
- It's a large chew, it's a big chunk of gum.
It's twist wrapped in a wrapper.
- [Jason] All hard candies were twist wrapped at the time.
They're really saying, you know what?
This gum is for fun.
This gum is for kids.
- [Narrator] While most chewing gum comes in packs,
Dubble Bubble hits stores like penny candy,
sold one piece at a time.
[intense music]
- [Adam] When they are unleashed upon the market,
they are a massive hit.
Kids love it.
And of course, they love the bubbles they get
with Dubble Bubble.
- [Narrator] Word of mouth spreads fast,
and within months, Dubble Bubble moves beyond Philadelphia
to become a national hit.
- [Jason] In their first year alone,
I think their sales are 1.5 million.
It's like 28 million in today's numbers.
Dubble Bubble is so successful for Fleer,
they actually discontinue their other product line.
- [Narrator] Fleer's breakthrough sparks
a wave of imitators
transforming bubblegum into a burgeoning industry.
But their greatest competition
is yet to be born.
[intense music]
It's 1938 in Brooklyn, New York,
and brothers Joe and Phil Shorin
have recently inherited their father's tobacco business.
- [Justin] So the American Leaf Tobacco Company,
it's founded by Morris Shorin in 1890,
and their business is to import tobacco
into the United States.
- [Jeff] The business begins failing Morris Shorin and his
sons seek other opportunities in the business world.
They reach out to a market research company
and just ask them what business
would they be able to put their talents towards.
The market company suggest chewing gum.
They like this idea.
Chewing gum, okay.
And so they give it a shot.
- [Jason] And they realize the American Leaf Tobacco Company
name is really not indicative
of what they're in the business of anymore.
- What's wrong with Shorin Brothers,
or just Shorin's?
Wrigley's made it work.
- Wrigley's is decades ahead of us.
We need something that screams top of the line
right out of the gate.
[intense music]
- Why not just say that?
- Say what?
- Top of the line.
- It's a little old fashioned.
What about just Topps?
- Topps.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] Topps will one day
be the biggest name in baseball cards,
raking in over $500 million annually,
sold in over 100 countries
with an astonishing 70% share of the market.
But before they get there,
they'll put an indelible stamp on bubblegum,
to the tune of a $700 million iconic brand.
But in 1941, the US is drawn into a world war.
Rationing hits and sugar disappears,
crippling the gum industry.
- [Jason] So what happened was now
bubblegum production was severely limited.
- [Adam] There was profound scarcity
and it created a proverbial pink market
where people were willing
to pay exorbitant amounts of money
just for pieces of bubblegum.
- [Jeff] Pieces that are selling for one penny
are now fetching upwards of a dollar a piece.
A dollar was a lot of money in 1945.
[intense music]
[package thudding]
- I just spent five bucks on six pieces of gum.
- Was it made of gold?
- It's pink gold.
I'm telling you, this is what we gotta be selling.
- We're already selling gum and we're barely turning profit.
- We sell chewing gum, chewing gum is boring, Phil.
We need to sell this.
- [Jason] Bubblegum was this emerging market,
a lot of excitement around it,
and really the only big brand in it was Dubble Bubble.
So they said, you know what?
That's a territory we can probably compete in
and maybe even grow in.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] There's only one problem.
The two former tobacco company men
don't know the first thing
about marketing to kids.
[intense music]
- So what does this stuff tell us kids love?
[intense music]
- [Narrator] It's 1945 and the Shorin brothers
have decided to pivot their chewing gum business
into bubblegum.
- So, what does this stuff tell us kids love?
- [Jason] They're looking around at these other categories
the kids are obsessed with.
You know, it's toys, it's slinkies, you know,
it's wartime play, dressing up as soldiers.
Secret decoder rings.
They're into comic books.
- America. - Exactly.
- [Adam] It's after World War II,
patriotism is at an all time high.
They know for the brand identity,
we're gonna go red, white and blue
- Toy soldiers were very popular around this time,
and they'd be shown holding what was always the newest,
biggest, most powerful weapon.
- War heroes with big, powerful weapons.
- [Don] In World War II, that was the Bazooka.
- Bazooka.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] In 1947, the Shorin brothers
released their first bubblegum, Bazooka,
pouring every last cent into its launch.
- [Jason] When it first came out, it came in a long tube.
It sort of indicated sections
so you could break off sections of it and chew
what was probably about the size
of a piece of Dubble Bubble.
- [Narrator] Topps only make a slight adjustment
to the Dubble Bubble flavor profile,
using less wintergreen in their formula.
- [Jason] The flavor of Bazooka is unique.
It's got its own notes, it's very distinctive.
- [Adam] And there was something very unique
inside the of a piece of Bazooka.
You've got your own comic book.
You've got a comic book inside the gum.
- [Narrator] Within just a few months,
Bazooka expands their distribution nationally,
only to find that initial sales are underwhelming.
- [Jason] Maybe it was price, maybe it was size.
But their first couple years were tough.
They were not very successful with Bazooka out of the gate.
- [Narrator] In an attempt to bolster sales,
Bazooka takes a page from Dubble Bubble's book
and introduces 1 cent, individually wrapped pieces.
Additionally, they turn to a longstanding sales technique
in the gum industry,
started by Wrigley in the 1890s.
- [Susan] Wrigley, he started by offering premiums.
So in the early days of pedaling his gum,
he would do things like offer,
say something like an umbrella.
I mean more expensive than the gum,
just to get 'em to try the gum.
- [Narrator] In an effort to build customer loyalty,
the Shorin's come up with an incentive
that they can add directly to the gum package itself.
- So with the original Bazooka,
you got this beautiful wrapper, you got a full color comic.
You also got a premium wrap inside
that would advertise various prizes
that kids could send wrappers away for.
And these were actually quality prizes.
You could get a bike,
you could get a sled, you could get roller skates.
So the prizes were of value and they were quality.
[intense music]
- I can't believe it.
Another catcher's mit.
That's the third one today.
You know each of those is 1700 comics.
- Kids love baseball.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] The strong response to their collectibles
gets the brothers thinking about other incentives
to keep kids coming back.
- [Jason] The initial idea was how do we sell more gum?
How do we get kids to be returning customers, right.
How to make these things in a way
that people would want to collect, right.
- Baseball cards.
- [Narrator] Topps isn't the first to include trading cards
with their products.
The practice started in the 1800s
with a business the Shorin's knew well,
the tobacco industry.
- [Jason] Trading cards go back to a cigarette entrepreneur
who started slipping cardboard inserts
into his cigarette packs just to make them firmer,
and then eventually started putting
different images and things.
- The trading cards you used to be able to find
in cigarette packs were really beautiful works of art.
They would feature athletes, great leaders,
plants, animals, medicines.
- [Narrator] In 1951, Topps enters the baseball card market
producing their first set, The Redbacks,
a modest 52 card collection.
- [Jason] When Topps got ahold of this idea,
they really fully modified and fully modernized
the idea of trading cards.
When they came out with their first baseball card set,
they standardized the sizes,
they went out and got exclusives with baseball players.
They put a lot of effort into the art.
- [Jeff] This is the blueprint
for all future card manufacturers.
You need good stats, you need bubblegum,
and you need high quality color photography.
- [Narrator] By adding single baseball cards
to their gum packages, kids would keep coming back,
striving for a full set.
- [Jason] And so they had kids buying baseball cards
and trading all year round.
And then not only that,
when you got all the players and you got the complete set,
it's like you were happy,
you suddenly have all the players, all the teams.
And it's like, wait a second, it's a new year.
Guess what? We got a brand new set for you.
It was ingenious.
[intense music]
- [Kevin] Baseball cards started as just some giveaway
to put into gum.
Later on that relationship switched,
and gum became something they just put into
a pack of trading cards.
And then later on they got rid of the gum altogether, man,
and it was just about the cards.
- [Narrator] Even as the baseball card industry explodes,
Bazooka bubblegum still lags behind Dubble Bubble.
And Fleer now begins selling baseball cards as well.
- [Jeff] Baseball cards were continuously outpacing
previous sales each year,
but they were always experimenting,
Topps was always trying new products.
- [Narrator] So Topps decide to try another marketing tactic
to put their gum on top.
- So we got the new sketches for the mascot.
- [Jason] So they hire a guy, Wesley Morris, this cartoonist,
they recruit him in to help them reformulate their comics.
- [Narrator] Though comics aren't new for them,
Joe Shorin hopes a new brand mascot
will grab kids' attention.
- [Jason] You can give kids a good character to latch onto,
a good mascot, ah, it's everything,
because mascot marketing becomes big in the fifties, right.
Mascot Marketing really starts to drive
these categories of kid products.
- [Narrator] But the mascot the artist creates for Bazooka
has a unique unexplained feature.
- What's with the eye patch?
Did the kid lose an eye?
- [Adam] A kid with an eye patch?
Why on earth would you make a kid with an eye patch?
- [Adam] Why on earth would you make a kid with an eye patch?
- We did say to make him memorable.
- [Adam] Well, because of a popular shirt ad at the time
that featured a model with an eye patch,
the man with the Hathaway shirt.
- [Jeff] It took Hathaway from a relatively small company
into the stratosphere after those ads debuted,
and Topps appropriate this idea.
- It's funny.
I like it.
What's his name? - Bazooka Joe.
- [Jason] Bazooka Joe is a kid that gets into trouble.
I mean, he has very short little adventures,
and Bazooka Joe becomes the sort of magical part
of the Bazooka alchemy
that really makes Bazooka soar as a brand.
- [Narrator] With the introduction of Bazooka Joe,
sales soar, surpassing Dubble Bubbles,
and making them number one.
- [Adam] For kids in the fifties,
Bazooka was the ultimate value added proposition.
You got a piece of gum that you can blow bubbles with.
Awesome.
You could save up rappers
and redeem them for cool things.
Awesome.
You got a free comic strip with it,
starring a kid, double awesome.
- [Narrator] By the late 1950s,
kids purchased nearly half a billion pieces
of Bazooka bubblegum each year.
- [Kevin] Bazooka bubblegum was sold
as freedom and independence and rebellion.
When it had previously just been like,
you wanna stick a gum, want some beamins.
You know something your old man
or your grandfather had in his pocket then.
Suddenly gum was marketed to us
and it became the currency of childhood.
- [Narrator] Bazooka holds its lead
as number one throughout the next decade,
with Fleer's Dubble Bubble holding steady as number two.
[intense music]
But in the early seventies,
a new gap in the market emerges,
and an unlikely player will try to fill it.
- [Adam] America had long been in love with the Life Saver.
It was originally marketed in 1912
as a summer heat resistant candy.
It ultimately had gotten so popular,
it was a billion roll a year business.
- [Jason] Life Savers sends their researchers
into candy stores across America to interview kids,
and find out what they liked and what they wanted.
- [Narrator] Life Savers want to get into
the bubblegum game
and they call on their target audience for inspiration.
- So first impressions, what do you think?
- [Jason] Life Savers, in their research,
they went straight to the customers and said,
okay, what do you like about bubblegum and what's missing?
- It hurts my jaw to chew.
- [Brooke] Your jaw would get sore from trying to break them
down, and everyone's wondering,
why can't you just make a softer bubblegum?
- [Jason] So Life Savers has their market research
and they gave these food scientists an assignment.
Come up with a bubblegum
that isn't hard when you first chew it, right,
that's gonna be soft.
That has a lot of intense flavor
and that can blow really big bubbles.
- [Narrator] Unlike the early days
of Bazooka and Dubble Bubble,
Life Savers is an established corporation
with all the resources to create what they're after.
- [Jason] So they have now an assignment.
And you know the thing about Life Savers at the time,
they had a really good set of confectionary scientists.
And they came up with a product which would change
the entire bubblegum landscape.
- [Narrator] In 1974,
Life Savers launches the first soft chunk bubblegum,
Bubble Yum.
- [Jason] It was a huge squareish chunk of gum,
and you unwrapped it, and you popped it in your mouth,
and it was immediately chewable.
- [Narrator] The flavor, often called soft and juicy,
is original bubblegum flavor,
and it comes in a pack of five
with a suggested retail price of 15 cents.
- [Vallery] They've pulled out all the stops with the
packaging, with the marketing.
They even have a slogan,
"The number yum taste in bubblegum."
- [Jason] You knew as soon as you saw those colors,
as soon as you saw those logos,
as soon as you saw those ads,
you just knew, ah, this bubblegum is just fun.
- [Narrator] Within a year of launching,
Bubble Yum surpasses Dubble Bubble, Bazooka,
and even Life Savers own candy rolls,
becoming America's most popular bubblegum.
- [Jason] The sales in the bubblegum category skyrocketed.
So suddenly people were buying more bubblegum
than they ever had before,
and that was all thanks to Bubble Yum.
- [Narrator] By 1977, bubblegum makes up one third
of all gum sales in the United States.
And Bubble Yum commands 27%
of the nearly quarter billion dollar bubblegum market.
Competitors soon take notice.
- [Adam] So three years after Bubble Yum
triumphantly enters the bubblegum scene,
Warner Lambert, makers of Dentyne and Trident,
and Chiclets decides they want to throw their hat
into the bubblegum ring,
and they create another iconic bubblegum brand,
Bubblicious.
- [Jason] Bubblicious tried to differentiate itself
by coming up with more creative flavors.
They were the first soft chunk bubble gum
to have a banana flavor.
Later on, they would come up with chocolate mint flavor.
They came up, I think the first Cherry Cola flavor.
- [Adam] So finally the biggest name in chewing gum
decides they are going to join the bubble gum wars.
Enter Wrigley with all of their gum making expertise
and all of their marketing dollars,
and they create the triumvirate,
the final brand in the great bubblegum brands
of my personal youth.
- There's a brand new bubblegum in town,
name Hubba Bubba.
- [Jason] They got this guy who had done a lot of westerns
to come in and he was the gum fighter.
They had a great campaign with it.
Who was the biggest bubble in the west?
The 1970s. Wow.
This bubblegum game was on fire,
and there was so much money being made
by so many people.
- [Narrator] Despite all the competition,
Bubble Yum manages to secure its spot as number one,
but the king of gum isn't done yet.
- Wrigley's realize there's a whole market
that they're missing out on.
- [Narrator] And something entirely new
is about to come out of left field.
- [Narrator] In Portland, Oregon.
A minor league baseball player is on the verge of greatness,
but not on the field.
- [Jason] Rob Nelson is a baseball pitcher,
never made it to the big leagues,
but he was a pitcher out of Cornell,
and he ended up landing with the Portland Mavericks.
[intense music]
- The bat boy on the team at the time
is a kid by the name of Todd Fields.
- Todd, what do you have there?
- [Adam] So Rob Nelson sees Todd Field
reach into a pouch and pull out these dark shreds
and put it between his cheek and gum,
and starts chewing.
He goes, "I know your mom, I know your sister,
you can't be chewing tobacco."
- [Jason] A lot of players chewed tobacco
and Rob was not a tobacco fan.
- And the bat boy is only 13-years-old.
So he asked him,
and he is like, no, it's just licorice.
- Are you chewing candy to be like the players?
- Yes, sir.
[intense music]
- [Vallery] Nelson saw that there was potentially
a really great product here.
- You're not in trouble.
In fact, you just gave me an idea.
Thank you for letting us use your kitchen, mam.
- [Adam] Rob Nelson is a left-handed pitcher.
He's not a cook,
and doesn't understand how certain foods,
let alone confections are made.
- [Vallery] So Nelson, he goes out
and he buys a make your own bubblegum kit.
And he takes the bubblegum
and he decides to make it look like chewing tobacco.
- [Adam] But he's got nowhere to put it together.
He doesn't have a kitchen.
So he thinks about the kid that inspired all this
and he says, "Todd,
do you think your mom would let me come over
and use her kitchen to make this gum?"
And he follows the instruction,
he's got all the emollients to make chewing gum,
and he mixes it.
- Let me see what we can do about the color.
[intense music]
[utensils clanking]
[intense music]
- [Brooke] Nelson's gum was brown for two reasons.
One, it was root beer flavored,
and two, he wanted it to look like
the tobacco it was inspired by.
- What do you think? - It looks great.
[intense music]
- [Adam] And they slice it kinda wild,
like cranky into these strips.
But it works.
It works.
And for all the kids that want to emulate
their favorite major leaguers,
this might be a novel entry into the bubblegum market.
- [Narrator] With his new tobacco inspired
bubblegum sample,
Nelson now needs to see if he can find a partner
to help him sell it.
[intense music]
- [Jason] He starts pitching it around
to different gum manufacturers,
and you know, he gets his rejections.
But then he lands with a gum manufacturer
already intimately tied to baseball,
the Wrigley family.
Of course, Wrigley Field,
the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Gum.
- What did you say you call this?
- Big League Chew.
- It's brown.
Bubble gum is meant to be pink.
- Well, yeah, the idea is,
it's supposed to be like real chewing tobacco.
- [Adam] And they open this pouch and they see these tan
brown irregularly shredded things,
and he doesn't know how to preserve it.
It's not really kept in a nice chewing gum way.
And the brown color from root beer is a bit off putting.
[intense music]
- With all due respect,
it tastes pretty awful.
[intense music]
- [Narrator] It is 1979 and minor league baseball pitcher,
Rob Nelson is looking for a distributor
for his new tobacco inspired bubblegum,
Big League Chew.
[intense music]
- Listen, we could sweeten the formula.
- I'm sorry Mr. Nelson,
but I'm afraid Wrigley's just can't sell this stuff.
- I appreciate your time, Mr. Wrigley.
- Well hold on now,
where are you off to so fast?
Please, sit please.
Just because your gum doesn't work the way it is,
doesn't mean you didn't just bring us a great idea.
- Mr. Nelson, we are interested in buying your concept,
the name too.
- Wait, so you do want Big League Chew?
- If you'll leave the gum making part to us.
[intense music]
- [Vallery] The product Nelson brought to them
was not visually appealing.
It didn't taste good,
but they thought the concept was genius.
- [Narrator] Wrigley's licenses Big League Chew
to a three year deal.
- So using their already existing recipe
for Hubba Bubba, soft chew bubblegum,
they begin making the shreds
and putting them in foil pouches,
much like you would see the big leaguers carrying Beach Nut
or any of the chewing tobacco that they loved.
- [Narrator] In May of 1980, Big League Chew was released.
The original flavor known as Outta Here Original
is standard bubblegum flavor.
Ground Ball Grape, Swingin' Sour Apple,
and Wild Pitch Watermelon are introduced shortly thereafter.
Retail prices range between 57 to 70 cents per pouch
with a portion advertised as the equivalent
of 26 sticks of gum.
- [Jason] The fun thing about Big League Chew when it launched
is it had this foil pouch,
which was like nothing we'd ever seen.
We had this artwork on the front
with this sausage nosed ball player.
This seemed like a forbidden product for kids to have.
- [Vallery] It's not surprising
that if you market an adult product to children
who want to be like their favorite baseball players,
it's gonna latch on.
- [Adam] In its first year,
Big League Chew garnered 8% of the bubble gum market,
3% of total gum sales,
and made 18 million in its first year.
- [Narrator] Big League Chew is so successful
that it leads the charge
for a growing sector of the bubble gum market, novelty gums.
- [Adam] Suddenly there was toothpaste gum,
Ghostbusters Slimer gum,
weird toilet gum, gum that looked like rocks
or little pebbles, strange stuff.
Hell, there was Mr. T Gold chain gum.
- [Narrator] With the help of novelty gums,
by 1993, Wrigley's secures its spot
as the top gum manufacturer in the world,
and the leader in bubblegum.
Today, the total bubblegum market
is valued at approximately $8 billion,
and is projected to reach nearly 12 billion by 2032.
- [Jason] Bubblegum is the amusement park of food.
Chewing gum was utilitarian,
bubblegum was a choice, you know.
And blowing bubbles, it had this extra action about it
that was pure entertainment, right.
- [Vallery] The beauty of bubblegum,
most kids are gonna be able to save up enough money
to go and buy a piece of bubblegum,
and they're gonna get to enjoy it and blow bubbles,
and it puts everyone on the same playing field.
- [Jason] The influence of bubblegum
can't be questioned.
They influenced how people marketed toward kids,
how people perceived kids as a marketplace.
And Fleer Dubble Bubble,
and Topps Bazooka were big parts
of helping companies understand that.
- [Adam] But the truth of the matter is,
this was an inflection point in history
and in confection history
where gum wasn't about fresh breath,
calming nerves or calming digestion.
This is where gum became a candy.
Gum became a treat.
It became fun, celebratory, brightly colored,
something special for kids of all ages.
Imagine America never had bubblegum before,
and now confection in America will never be the same again.