What is juicy fruit flavor

Jacob M. asks: Does juicy fruit gum actually contain any fruit juice?

Table of Contents Show

Description
Consumer demographics
New flavors
Ingredients

With a brand recognition rate somewhere close to 99% in the States, it’s pretty safe to say that almost everyone reading this has at least heard of Juicy Fruit gum, if not also chewed it at some point. The question we’re looking at today is- exactly what fruit is Juicy Fruit supposed to taste like and does it actually contain any dehydrated juice from that fruit?

Now you’d think that answering this question would be as simple as picking up a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and reading the ingredients list, but as with most things in life, we discovered it’s just not that easy. For starters, the ingredients listed on a pack of Juicy Fruit are incredibly vague; the only real piece of useful information you can glean from a pack itself is that the gum contains “Natural and artificial flavors”. Helpful…

This also isn’t helped by the fact that Wrigley, the company who make Juicy Fruit, are similarly coy about discussing what goes into their product, often choosing to refrain from mentioning any specific fruit in regards to its flavour and excusing this evasive behaviour by stating that the flavour is a trade secret.

That said, with a little digging, you’ll find that, in the past, Wrigley has explicitly said that Juicy Fruit contains notes of “lemon, orange, pineapple and banana” in response to emails from curious customers asking for more specific information about Juicy Fruit’s flavour. Again though, this isn’t entirely helpful in discerning whether or not the gum actually contains fruit juice, since (always awesome) science has made it possible to synthesize almost any flavour we want.

Curiously, there is a fruit out there known to taste almost exactly like Juicy Fruit- a lesser known fruit from the shores of Africa and Asia known as Jackfruit. Jackfruit tastes so much like Juicy Fruit gum that it is often one of the first things mentioned when it’s discussed by Western media and there is a small, but nonetheless dedicated subset of people who believe that it is the key secret ingredient in the gum.

However, although Jackfruit tastes like Juicy Fruit gum, this isn’t because Juicy Fruit contains any juice from the Jackfruit (a dead giveaway being that there are no records of Wrigely importing the fruit or juice). The real reason the two taste and smell so similar is because they both (probably) contain a chemical called, isoamyl acetate. The reason we have to say “probably” is because, as noted, Wrigley won’t confirm what exactly goes into making Juicy Fruit, which is their right as a company, but experts are still pretty sure that isoamyl acetate has something to do with Juicy Fruit.

One of the most compelling arguments for isoamyl acetate being the primary flavouring agent behind Juicy Fruit is that, like Jackfruit, the chemical is said to smell very similar to it. Even in literature that doesn’t mention Juicy Fruit by name, isoamyl acetate is said to have an indistinct, almost indescribably “fruity” smell that contains hints of banana, peach and other similar sweet fruits, which is pretty much the exact same way people who haven’t eaten Jackfruit describe Juicy Fruit.

Making this argument even more tantalising is that, historically, one of the few ways to obtain isoamyl acetate in commercially viable quantities was as a by-product of whiskey production. When Wrigley first began producing Juicy Fruit gum in 1893, they did so from a factory in Illinois, the biggest whiskey State in America at the time. Suggesting that, perhaps, Wrigley sourced isoamyl acetate, and hence Juicy Fruit’s unique flavour, from the many factories producing whiskey nearby.

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence of all about Juicy Fruit’s flavour being the result of artificially created chemicals instead of real fruit is that they themselves used to explicitly advertise the “artificial flavor” of their product as a unique selling point up until a few decades ago. You see, early packs of Juicy Fruit starting around the 1940s carried the slogan “The Gum With the Fascinating Artificial Flavor” which they used as a way of enticing customers to try it.

It is only in recent years, with the trend to avoid artificial chemicals in consumables, that Wrigley has shied away from advertising the fact that Juicy Fruit’s unique flavour is, in all likelihood, the result of artificially created chemicals rather than a cocktail of chemicals directly extracted from fruit.

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Expand for References

The packaging

Juicy Fruit is a brand of chewing gum made by the Wrigley Company, a U.S. company that since 2008 has been a subsidiary of the privately held Mars, Incorporated. It was introduced in 1893, and in the 21st century the brand name is recognized by 99 percent of Americans, with total sales in 2002 of 153 million units.

Description

Flavor

Which fruit serves as the model for its flavor is kept vague in advertising, though in 2003, advertising agency BBDO characterized it as a combination of banana and pineapple, and some people say it resembles jackfruit. According to two books in the Imponderables series, peach is one crucial flavor among many others.

It is likely that the chemical used for flavoring is isoamyl acetate (sometimes known as banana oil), a carboxylic ester, which is also found in jackfruit .

Consumer demographics

The average age of the typical Juicy Fruit consumer is under 20, with three to eleven year olds making up the heart of the business; those twenty years old and over account for 40% of the purchases.

Sean Payton, head coach of the New Orleans Saints of the NFL is well known for requesting Juicy Fruit in the middle of games.

New flavors

Juicy Fruit has just released a "Sweet Flavors" Kiwi-Strawberry flavor. They have also released Juicy Fruit Desserts. There are four variations of Desserts: Orange Creme Pop, Strawberry Shortcake, Lemon Square and Apple Pie. Juicy Fruit also has released Juicy Secret and Juicy Riddle which are both sugar free. Beginning in 2015, Juicy Fruit released two new flavors based on Starburst candy: Strawberry and Cherry. In December 2017, Juicy Fruit introduced Juicy Fruit Mixies which include their Original flavor along with three new flavors: Strawberry, Watermelon and Grape.

Ingredients

Juicy Fruit gum consists mostly of sugar contained in a synthetic gum base. Other ingredients include corn syrup and dextrose as bulk agents and natural sweeteners, natural and artificial flavorings, glycerol and lecithin as softening agents, aspartame (NutraSweet) and acesulfame K as artificial sweeteners, Yellow Lake 5 as a coloring and BHT as a preservative.

In the UK the ingredients used are as listed: Sugar, Gum Base, Glucose Syrup, Flavourings, Humectant (Glycerol), Emulsifier (Soybean Lecithin), Sweeteners (Acesulfame K, Sucralose), Antioxidant (BHA).

History

When William Wrigley Jr. started his new business in Chicago, he began by selling his father's Scouring Soap, which he would entice customers to purchase by adding a free gift of baking powder. Unfortunately for Wrigley Jr., this ended up being far more popular than the Scouring Soap, so he switched to begin production and sales of baking powder. In 1892, Wrigley Jr. decided to give his baking powder customers a free gift, this time, attaching a few sticks of chewing gum to the box of baking powder.

The chewing gum was far more popular than the baking powder, so Wrigley Jr. again switched his business to production and sales of chewing gum. In 1893, Wrigley Jr. introduced a new flavor of gum, Juicy Fruit, which helped the Wrigley Company to become the most popular and successful chewing gum company in the world.

When the brand first entered the market, it was packaged simply, with a plain wrapper and "JUICY FRUIT" in red, thin block letters. In 1914, Wrigley changed it to thin vertical white and green stripes with "Wrigley's Juicy Fruit Chewing Gum" centered in a stylized Maltese Cross emblem with a black background.

Juicy Fruit was taken off of the civilian market temporarily during World War II because of ingredient shortages and the demand for the gum to be included in C-rations. When the gum was re introduced to the general public after World War II ended, the striped packaging was replaced by one with a bright yellow background and "Juicy Fruit" bracketed between two stylized chevrons, the latter a motif meant to echo the "Wrigley arrow" element used for Wrigley's Spearmint since 1893.

The bright yellow background remained into the 21st century, with variations since 2002 turning the arrowhead like chevrons into the corners of an elongated smile under the brand name. Juicy Fruit is still widely popular today.

In 2003 in the United States, Wrigley's replaced some of the sugar in Juicy Fruit with two artificial sweeteners, aspartame and Ace K.

In 2009, Wrigley's started selling a sugar free version of Juicy Fruit.[

"Grapefruit—Juicy Fruit" is a song written and performed by American popular music singer songwriter Jimmy Buffett. It was first released on his 1973 album A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean and was his third single from that album. The single reached #23 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart in September 1973.

It also features in the 1983 song "Juicy Fruit" by Mtume. Separately, a Juicy Fruit jingle—"the taste, the taste, the taste is going to move ya!"—was widely recognizable in TV advertisements throughout the 1980s.