Why is Bubblegum Pink & What is Bubblegum Flavor?

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is La Hebb, and this is Our American Stories. Chewing gum has been around for centuries, from the ancient Greeks to the American Indians. Everyone’s chewed it, but the best kind of gum, bubblegum, wasn’t invented until 1928. Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: Bubblegum, the ambiguously flavored, obnoxiously pink candy gum, is the favorite treat of Violet Beauregarde. Now this little number, or…

00:00:46
Speaker 3: Such as are, Violet?

00:00:46
Speaker 4: Would you care to say a few words here?

00:00:49
Speaker 3: It is golden ticket number three, and it’s all lost.

00:00:51
Speaker 4: What happened, Violet?

00:00:52
Speaker 3: Were the gum true? Normally? But when I heard about these ticket things, wrong, as I laid off the gum and switched to candy bars instead. Now, of course, I’m right back on gum. I chew all day, except at mealtimes when I stick a pin in my ear. Ile AT’s call it, Mother. And this piece of gum here is one that I’ve been chewing on for three months solid, and that’s a world record. It’s beaten the record held by my best friend, Miss Cornelia Prince. Mad? How can you, yeah?

00:01:17
Speaker 1: Why is speaking ‘mut On’ here for a moment?

00:01:19
Speaker 2: So, first, the story of how bubblegum became the thing at all. In 1928, Walter Diemer was working as an accountant for the now-defunct candy and baseball card manufacturer, Fleer. At this time, Fleer was struggling financially when then-president of the company, Gilbert Mustin, hit upon the idea of creating his own gum base to improve profit margins. At the time, they bought their gum products from another manufacturer before repackaging it and selling it. Towards this end, Mustin began tinkering with recipes, but was frequently called away from his work to answer the building’s only phone, which was on the first floor, while his office and the mixers were on the third. Accordingly, whenever Mustin was called away, Diemer, who worked in an office next door, was called upon to watch over the latest gumbatch or lend a hand when necessary. Over time, Mustin began to trust the 23-year-old accountant to such an extent that he was allowed to experiment on his own time—a perk Diemer took frequent advantage of, often spending many hours after a shift mixing random flavors together and tinkering with the Fleer gum base recipe in order to improve it. Diemer claims he stumbled across the formula for bubblegum partially by accident, after about a year of tinkering. In his own words, “It was an accident.” “I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles.” As with many of these supposed accidents, this isn’t quite correct. Diemer’s goal was always to create a kind of gum you could blow bubbles with. So while it’s nice to think that Diemer accidentally mixed a bunch of chemicals together and stumbled across a lottery ticket recipe, the reality is that he spent many hundreds of hours meticulously mixing batches of gum together in the hopes of getting the formula for bubblegum just right, coming remarkably close to doing so on several occasions, only for the results not to repeat when mixed again. Diemer’s inspiration for bubblegum was an earlier, never-released prototype product created by Fleer’s founder, Frank H. Fleer. This was created in 1906, and it was called Blibber-Blubber. Like bubblegum, Blibber-Blubber could be used to blow bubbles. However, the gum would stick to teeth, lips, and cheeks. It was much too wet and had poor elasticity. This resulted in any bubbles you managed to blow popping quickly, splattering saliva everywhere, and then adhering tightly to your face and lips. While Diemer’s exact recipe isn’t publicly known, he claimed that he was able to fix the former problem by adding some unspecified amount of latex, resulting in a more elastic and less sticky gum. That said, this wasn’t the only tweak needed, as in his earliest near-hits at inventing bubblegum, the resulting gum worked perfectly at first, but had an extremely short shelf life due to an issue with hardening up within a matter of hours after being made. It was this problem that was eventually accidentally fixed by Diemer, though he never publicly mentioned how he fixed it or why the solution was supposedly accidentally stumbled upon. Today, wax is typically added to gum to keep it soft at room temperature, and some form of powder like cornstarch is used to keep it from becoming too sticky, whatever the case. After inventing bubblegum, Diemer scaled up the recipe and created 300 pounds of it. This brings us to why bubblegum is nearly always pink. According to Diemer, when the time came to add food coloring to his first proper batch of bubblegum, the only coloring the company had on hand was pink, which just so happened to be his favorite color. And if that made you go, “Hmm,” well, around this time, pink was actually considered a masculine color, and blue was a favorite feminine color. With no other choice available to him, Diemer poured an entire bottle of pink food coloring into the mixer, giving the candy its now-iconic, obnoxiously loud coloration. Over the years, as more companies attempted to create competing products, they similarly colored it pink, leading to it becoming the go-to color for bubblegum. Ultimately, Fleer settled on the name Double Bubble for the product and decided to individually package the candy in a manner not too dissimilar to how pieces of taffy are traditionally sold, and then sent 100 sample pieces to a small store located at 26 Chemek Taddy Street, Philadelphia. The store sold out within a day, prompting Fleer to make several more tons of the bubblegum and begin widely marketing it. In the first year of bubblegum sales alone, Fleer sold $1.5 million worth of the gum, which is about $21 million today, literally saving the company, though Diemer himself never received a dime extra for his non-accounting invention. However, in recognition of his integral role in the creation of the product that saved the company, Fleer promptly fired Diemer from his role as company accountant and made him an executive of sales. His job then included training salesmen on how to blow bubbles so they could demonstrate the product to potential customers. Originally priced at just a penny, bubblegum proved to be immensely popular with Depression-era customers, and as a result, Diemer’s job, which he formerly was close to losing due to the company being close to going under, proved to be both secure and rather lucrative during one of the most financially taxing times in American history. While he received no royalties from the product, as the years passed, Diemer was paid to travel the globe promoting Double Bubble, eventually being promoted to senior vice president and serving on the company’s board of directors. He continued to hold the latter board seat for some 15 years after he retired in 1970. Even after retiring, Diemer’s love for bubblegum never subsided, and he could frequently be found literally riding an adult-sized tricycle around his retirement village in Pennsylvania, throwing handfuls of free bubblegum, of which he was given a lifetime supply by Fleer, to local children. He also reportedly occasionally invited neighborhood children over to his house for bubblegum-blowing parties. According to Diemer’s second wife, Florence, whom he married at the age of 91, his first wife, Adelaide, died in 1994, years after their two children both died in 1986, though at least leaving them with many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He made it explicitly clear late in life that he didn’t care about not receiving any money for his creation, something that would have made him enormously wealthy had he patented it. As the man himself noted shortly before his death at the age of 92 on January 9, 1988, “I’ve done something with my life.” “I’ve made kids happy around the world.” Okay, so this brings us around to what the standard flavor of bubblegum is supposed to taste like. The original formula used by Fleer was intentionally never elaborated upon, and the recipe is now considered to be a trade secret in the same way as products like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. That said, the original ingredients list included sugar, dextrose, corn syrup, gum base, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavor, color, cornstarch, and BHT. Digging a little deeper, we have a rough idea of the base flavor ingredients based on interviews with Diemer, who claims he originally used a combination of wintergreen, peppermint, vanilla, and cinnamon in unspecified quantities to come up with the flavor for the first ever batch of bubblegum. This contrasts slightly with other sources who contend that bubblegum flavor is actually created using a mixture of several natural and artificial fruit flavors, usually strawberry, pineapple, and banana in varying quantities, so in the end, the flavor is an artificial construct with no analog in nature. Given this, the answer to the question of “What is bubblegum supposed to taste like?”

00:08:41
Speaker 4: Is, “Well, bubblegum.” And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast.

00:08:57
Speaker 1: Go to both, visit them, visit them often. And boy, what a terrific story about an inventor who was an accountant, never got royalties, didn’t get the patent, but saved his company. And we’re talking about Walter Diemer. And in 1928, well, he had to try and figure out some way to save his company, and he did. And the whole notion that this happened by accident, well, that’s kind of debunked because accidents happened to people who were trying to create something and spend their time in labs hundreds of hours mixing batches of formula to get to the outcome they want to get, which in this case is one of the great confectioneries in human history, Double Bubble. By the way, we’ve done many food stories: Fanny Farmer, Little Debbie, Fast Food, Piggly Wiggly, Jelly Belly, Trader Joe’s, even Buc-ee’s is kind of a food story. The story of bubblegum here on Our American Stories.