It’s Just Not Cool Anymore
One of the through lines in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Ladies, a rebellious clique of high-school girls, repeatedly appear on-screen either smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. In the film, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease that a production designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors. After the movie’s release, Topps reportedly paid $1 million to feature Travolta and Newton-John on trading cards sold with packs of bubblegum.
arrived when gum was part of the image of a new kind of late-’70s teen rebel: a slick high schooler who dons leather jackets, smokes cigarettes, talks openly about sex, and masticates frequently. In and , where its presence conveyed that Marlon Brando’s and Julia Roberts’s characters, respectively, didn’t conform to social standards. In recent times, however, people have been chewing less. From 2009 to 2015, store sales a year in North America. The pandemic then intensified that trend: Today, overall gum sales are still down about 32 percent from 2018, according to data provided by the consumer-research firm Circana. Tellingly, Wrigley one of its gum factories in 2016, and late last year, Mondelez its gum businesses (which included Trident and Dentyne) in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
