making chewing gum
How Is Wrigley’s Chewing Gum Made?
The Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company manufactures chewing gum using long-lasting flavor and dependable, uniform quality. This includes manufacturing your gum from spotless, air-conditioned rooms and sampling all ingredients before accepting them into any of your 14 factories. After raw ingredients are approved for quality, the first production stage begins.
1. Melting The making of Wrigley’s gum begins by melting and purifying the gum base, which comes from small round balls.
2. Mixing The melted base is poured into a mixer that can hold up to one ton of ingredients. Sweeteners and flavors are added at just the right moment and from just the right amounts and then slowly mixed.
3. Rolling
From the mixers, a large "loaf" of gum is sent through a series of rollers that form it into a thin, wide ribbon. Each pair of rollers is set closer together than the previous pair, gradually reducing the thickness of the gum. A light coating of finely powdered sugar or sugar substitute is added during this process to keep the gum from sticking and to enhance flavor.
4. Scoring At the end of the rolling process, the continuous ribbon of gum is then cut into a pattern for sticks or small rectangular gum centers, depending on what type of gum is being made.
5. Conditioning The scored gum is then moved to a temperature-controlled environment to cool and ensure the finished gum will have the right consistency and stay fresh on store shelves.
6. Breaking and Coating (gum pellets) After tempering, the gum centers are broken into individual pieces. The pieces are then fed to a spray drier that forms the hard coating around the gum center. It tumbles the pieces while a prepared syrup mixture, made of filtered water, sweeteners, and coloring is sprayed onto the gum. This combination of tumbling and spray coating forms a candy shell around the soft gum centers.
7. Wrapping (gum sticks) After cooling and tempering, skilled operators break the sheets of sticks up into sections and feed them into the wrapping machine. In one continuous process, the wrapping machine receives and wraps the sticks, applies the outer wrapper, and seals the end of the package.
8. Packaging (gum pellets) This is where the pellet-style gum is put into the formed plastic compartments of the blister pack. The package is heat sealed using a foil a cardboard sleeve.
Most of Wrigley’s wrapping machines were designed and built by Wrigley engineers and machinists, and each is a marvel of precision made up of over 6,000 parts.
The Wrigley Company has 14 manufacturing factories worldwide; four from North America, four from Europe, one from Africa, one from India and four from the Asia/Pacific region.
Wrigley chewing gum ingredients
Ingredients used from Wrigley’s gum are extensively tested to ensure that their quality meets the standards of all local and international government food regulations.
Gum Base
Gum base puts the "chew" from chewing gum, binding all the ingredients together for a smooth, soft texture. The Wrigley Company uses synthetic gum base materials that provide longer-lasting flavor, improved texture and reduced tackiness.
Sweeteners
The finest grades of pure powdered cane sugar, beet sugar and corn syrup are used from the production of Wrigley's sugar-sweetened chewing gums.
Several types of high-intensity sweeteners are used from Wrigley’s sugarfree products and as flavor enhancers from some other brands. These artificial sweeteners deliver long-lasting, noncaloric taste and do not promote tooth-decay.
- Acesulfame K
- Aspartame
- Maltilol
- Sorbitol
- Xylitol
Preservatives
A small amount of preservative helps maintain the freshness of all Wrigley products.
Flavorings and Colorings
The most popular flavors for chewing gums come from the mint plant. Mint flavoring for Wrigley’s chewing gums is extracted from fresh mint plants grown on farms from the United States. After the plants are harvested, they go through a distillation process that extracts the oils used for flavoring Wrigley brands. Other Wrigley brands are flavored by a variety of fruit and spice essences. Colorings are used to distinguish different flavors.
Softeners
Glycerin and other vegetable oil products help keep the gum soft and flexible by retaining the proper amount of moisture from Wrigley products.