Gum Sales Peaked in 2011. Can Mars Wrigley Get People Chewing Again?

Orbit maker’s $50 million campaign and push into e-commerce follow a pandemic slump that caused purchasing and chewing habits to become unstuck

By: Katie Deighton

Here at CSMN we find this article to stand out because it discusses the decline in gum sales since their peak in 2011 and the strategies Mars Wrigley is employing to rejuvenate the market. Highlighting a shift in marketing, Mars Wrigley is promoting gum as a stress reliever and mental wellness tool, rather than just a breath freshener. This approach includes new products like Respawn by 5 gum aimed at gamers, as well as a global ad campaign to attract new customers by emphasizing the benefits of chewing gum for concentration and relaxation​ (Mars Brands)​​ (9News)​.

Mars Wrigley is spending millions of dollars in a bid to restore chewing gum to its former glory with consumers, starting with an international ad campaign that jettisons typical category promises such as fresh breath or great taste.

Mars is instead promoting its Orbit and Extra gum brands through the lens of mindfulness, purporting that mastication can silence anxious thoughts, improve focus or boost confidence. “Quiet your mind mouth with Extra Gum,” one ad concludes. 

The investment represents a new commitment to gum, which in recent years has been chewed up by the pandemic and spat out by big player Mondelez. Gum sales have been looking soft for years, with blame cast everywhere from younger consumers’ desire for natural ingredients to the drop in store visits during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

Global gum sales fell to $16.1 billion in 2020 from $19.5 billion the year prior, and only crept back up to $18.6 billion in 2023, according to market research firm Euromonitor, which is forecasting sales of $19.7 billion this year. The industry’s peak to date came back in 2011, when nearly $25 billion of gum was sold in today’s currency.

The U.S. gum market last year rebounded to $3.39 billion in sales, just beating its 2019 revenue of $3.15 billion and thereby erasing its own pandemic plunge, according to data from Circana. But the U.S. total masks a 27% decline in unit sales since 2019, while prices per unit rose nearly 50%. U.S. gum sales peaked in 2010, according to Euromonitor.

Brands across the category have tried to use marketing to reposition the benefits of gum, cycling through the classics of fresh breath and long-lasting taste to claims like greater confidence in romantic situations. 

Mars says the time is right to invest in its gum portfolio as sales naturally pick back up after the pandemic. The company also wants to get more people to buy gum online, so it is working on ways to create purchase opportunities at e-commerce checkouts and dreaming up potential gum subscription products.

“The category is vibrant and growing again,” said Rankin Carroll, Mars Wrigley’s chief brand officer.

Rebranding such a familiar product isn’t easy, however, industry observers say.

“No one’s found a way to kind of engage people with gum and make it relevant in the way that it was before,” said Nicholas Fereday, a food and consumer trends analyst at Dutch bank Rabobank. “Often in food, startups will jump on a declining category and reinvent it. With gum, that never happened.”

Losing flavor

Theories abound to explain gum’s shrinking bubble. 

Some say it has simply fallen out of fashion, no longer associated with youthful rebellion any more than visible tattoos and pantyhose-less legs. Some cite the declining popularity of cigarettes, undermining gum’s use to disguise the smell of tobacco. 

There are other conjectures.

“Younger people are concerned more about artificial sweeteners and ingredients that often feature in gum,” said Lynn Dornblaser, director of innovation and insight at market research firm Mintel Group. 

The pandemic also curtailed certain consumer behaviors that seemed to call for breath fresheners, such as in-person dating and social gatherings, Dornblaser said. 

Then there’s the issue of masking, Dornblaser added. “It’s not easy to chew gum when you’re wearing a mask,” she said. “It’s way easier to pop a mint into your mouth.”

Covid-19 lockdowns also interrupted the behavior of picking up a pack of gum at corner and grocery stores, according to Carroll, the Mars brand chief. 

“Fifty percent of gum is purchased on impulse, so when you have a good portion of your distribution outlets closed, gum really suffers,” he said. 

An Elastic Category

Mars, which is not a publicly traded company and declined to share sales figures for its gum business, will spend around $50 million on the latest campaign and will reach consumers in around 70 countries, with investment particularly concentrated in Europe, Carroll said. 

Previous marketing for Orbit and Extra centered on the confidence-boosting properties of gum, particularly after the pandemic when people were disoriented after spending months apart. The new ads that rolled out to the U.S. last month continue in this vein, but commercials in other countries lean more obviously into the idea of mental wellness with surrealist images of mouths in the middle of people’s foreheads. 

“This is probably the biggest shift for us, positioning-wise, in the history of the brand,” Carroll said.

Gum has occasionally been pitched as a sort of tonic before. Ads from Wrigley, which was acquired by Mars in 2008, first dabbled in the idea that chewing is a stress reliever in the early 1900s, for example, and Trident in February 2020 released a campaign that encouraged people to “chew through” life’s problems.

Trident’s owner at the time, Mondelez International, had been struggling to keep gum sales climbing, especially in developed markets including North America. “And then Covid comes and makes the situation even worse for everybody,” Chief Executive and Chairman Dirk Van de Put said at a conference in December 2020.

By 2022, Mondelez announced it would unload its gum business, including Trident and Bubblicious, to Dutch gum and confectionery maker Perfetti Van Melle for $1.35 billion, citing a strategy to focus its efforts on snacking items like chocolate and cookies. 

Perfetti Van Melle, a private company that already owned the candy brands Mentos and Chupa Chups, said then that the acquisition would help the company become the global leader in gum. A spokeswoman declined to comment on the potential it sees in the category, saying that the company is in the process of integrating the Mondelez acquisitions.

In the U.S., Mars rival Hershey’s said its gum sales increased 21% in 2023 from the year prior, with its Ice Breakers brand leading the drive. The brand’s most recent campaign was a product-centered push designed to highlight the “fanciness” of Ice Breakers compared with its competitors.

Hershey’s Bubble Yum sales have doubled over the past three years, according to the company, which said the brand was benefiting from the recent consumer trend of buying nostalgic food and brands.

The campaign for Orbit and Extra, as well as Mars’s Freedent and Yida brands, uses pop-art graphics and humor partly to signal that its new well-being message stops short of a serious psychological promise. But the central idea holds, Carroll said.

“It’s a piece of chewing gum, it’s not a promise of a better life,” he said. “But it’s going to cost you somewhere between $1 and $2, and it helps you with a little bit of stress here and helps you with a little bit of focus there.”

Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com