From Freshening to Wellness: The Future of Gum - Interview with Wrigley's Ross Ripamonti

Gum is currently having a good spell (growing at a rate of +4.9 per cent while broad confectionery is basically flat), but we begin by addressing a couple of knotty, almost philosophical questions: first, is gum confectionery; and second, does gum really belong in the mints and gum subcategory?

If anybody has answers, it is Ross Ripamonti.

When the trade press writes a product feature on gum, it's always mints and gum together, separate from confectionery because they don’t quite fit into confectionery. But then gum in the past has not been quite a thing on its own, either – because it's not a big enough category, or its adjacency to mints (which are also often confectionery and made into chocs and chews) and refreshment is so close that they naturally go together. That’s how it has always been, but just lately something seems to have developed – not sure exactly what – such that it seems gum is coming into its own, distinct and separate, and emerging as a category, perhaps for several reasons.

We agree that although gum is almost always sweet, but is not consumed like candy, it’s not an edible, and not therefore, confectionery, strictly speaking. Also, as I discover during the interview, to assume that gum is all about being minty is a bit of a misnomer these days, as the best-selling flavours are increasingly of the fruity kind.

Ross is Mars Wrigley through and through. He started there 10 years ago as a marketing intern (with Wrigley), then after finishing university, joined the Mars management graduate programme.

Ross RipamontiPhoto: LinkedIn

“They put me in different areas of the business, and I ended up in marketing and worked around different portfolios on the chocolate side, different brands,” says Ross. “And then, two and a half years ago, I moved into this role and became gum brand director, which has been fantastic. So it's a full loop, coming back into the gum world.”

He has an excellent overview of how the gum category is evolving, and from my own narrower perspective I suggest that gum is now a Big Thing – especially since it recovered from the dip in sales occasioned by the COVID lockdown sequence – with strides made in sales and penetration.

“I certainly think so," agrees Ross. “Historically, gum and mints have often been bunched together from a consumer perspective, because mints predominantly serve or cater towards one specific consumption moment. Gum and mints are in quite a functional relationship. The category heartland for gum has also been in freshening. Most of the gum portfolio historically has been mint, and so I think that's why they've been put together.”

But now it is changing, at least a bit?

“I think what's really interesting, certainly over the last probably 10 years, is we've seen that people are chewing gum for a lot more and wider reasons now than just freshening,” Ross explains.

“Only 20 per cent of chewing occasions are freshening, and 80 per cent are for other reasons. For example, I chew gum because it's fun. I chew gum because I just want that hit of flavour without having to eat anything. I chew gum because I want a mental reset, you know, working and studying, and it helps me get into the zone. So, I think that's what we're really excited about, certainly from Mars Wrigley point of view: how do we communicate more of those benefits and portray gum in a wider way that caters to more consumption moments?”

This neatly brings us to Wrigley’s strategy to get the part of the nation chewing that currently isn’t, and the way to do that is to highlight what gum can do for you – the mental and wellness functions – that chewing a flavourful and mindful piece of gum can do for you to improve your day. It's meditation, concentration, because it helps you work. It's refreshment, fresh breath, so self-image and self-presentation. Also, you're not consuming calories while you're chewing gum, either, or if you are, it's just a tiny amount of sugar, so it's not nutrition, but it sort-of is. Not a slimming aid, exactly, but it feeds into that: if you’re chewing gum, you’re not eating a pie or a donut.

Get chewing

It’s possible there's a great deal of merchandising hinterland that you can advance into with gum that you simply can't with ordinary confectionery or regular mints.

"100 per cent,” says Ross, “and this month we launched a new marketing platform called Chew Good. And that's exactly the area we're moving more and more into and communicating those broader reasons for chewing.

Wrigley believes that's really the key way of growing penetration: talking about those wider benefits of chewing, beyond freshening. “Because fundamentally, our category penetration is around 30 per cent in the UK, but we know from research that 15 per cent of people in the UK simply will not chew gum. For whatever reason, however much marketing is directed at them, they say they won't chew gum.”

He says that leaves 55 per cent of people in the UK who don't chew gum, but who would be open to chewing gum if they had the right reasons to. “And that's what I'm really excited about: how do we tap into that market by fundamentally giving people more reasons to chew?”

Just as a little aside into history that will bring us back up to date with the “new chew” ambitions of Wrigley, it must be said that gum from the earliest days around the turn of the twentieth century, or well over a hundred years ago – was always quintessentially modern. Liberating, youthful, unbuttoned and informal, sociable, street-life – all these words sum up the atmosphere that gum carries with it, opposed to the corseted, formal, strict world of the nineteenth century. Chewing gum meant chat, it meant teenage attitude and gangs, it meant sport (replacing the plugs of tobacco chewed by old-time baseball players – the Chicago Cubs’ stadium is not called Wrigley Field for nothing).

William Wrigley JnrPhoto: Mars

William Wrigley Jnr, when he began hawking his new spearmint-flavoured gum around as a thing in itself in the early 1900s (rather than as a free gift when you bought his soap powder), presented it exactly as Ross is now suggesting. In fact, Wrigley started out with claims that gum could enhance physical and mental health.

“Gum, Wrigley argued, could soothe not only nervous stomachs but stressed-out minds, making the product more patent medicine than candy," says a fascinating article at JSTOR Daily. “Despite popular perceptions that chewing gum was rude, Wrigley prevailed, convincing Americans that they were stressed and sick and providing them with a stick of respite.”

Of course, nobody today is making literal medical claims for gum, but there is undeniably and element of thoughtfulness, for taking time for oneself, for relaxing with friends and taking off pressure, that accompanies the action of popping a piece of gum and enjoying the explosion of flavour and all its associations.

“Interesting, that 15 per cent will not do it," I say. "Is that the grannies and retired sergeant majors who think it's impolite or something – an old-fashioned prejudice about ‘the youth of today’”?

“Exactly," says Ross. “There's a variety of reasons, but fundamentally people have their own reasons, right?”

But that 55 per cent of current non-chewers represents a fabulous area of possible incremental gain for the category.

“I think the gum category is very exciting because despite the fact it's been around for a long time, it's still actually an immature category. There are few categories like gum that have such high potential for growth through drawing new customers in. You referenced confectionery, so let's take chocolate. Chocolate has 99 per cent penetration, so the only way you're going to grow chocolate is people paying more, buying more often or buying greater quantities of chocolate.”

A fair point, I say, finger in the air.

“With chocolate it's not going to be new people coming into the category, whereas gum is about getting new people in. And that's exciting, and from a footfall point of view, there's been stability and growth since COVID. People are on the move again, and obviously, they're working from home more as well. So that is an opportunity around gum bottles and the take-home formats – it's a massive, massive trend there, and related to how people consume gum differently.

And then, there is also the whole idea around people looking for products that can help them with their holistic well-being, Ross adds.

“You know, everyone has a well-being strategy, and it looks very different according to the person. If you ask one person, it’s about exercise, another person might be just the way they eat and their diet. And I think gum can really play into that and the sort of the mental reset benefit of chewing gum. There’s a big trend, as well, around products that can help people in their work and study space, or experience moments during the day where they need that mental reset, a sort of reinvigoration.”

So convenience!

In terms of sales, Gum is great news for convenience and always has been. It offers choice, visibility and instant appeal. It's surely a toss-up whether there's anything more impulsive than gum as a product in the channel, and therefore as an important product for the channel.

“The first thing I'll say is, from all the research that we've done, we see that gum is the most impulsive product in store, versus any other product,” says Ross. “I think water is the second most impulsive, but gum is the most. 88 per cent of chewing gum is bought on impulse. So, it is the most unplanned, unsubstitutable product you could possibly have in-store, and that is what makes it very exciting from an impulse point of view, because it's highly incremental and highly expandable. The more people buy, the more they're going to consume.”

Ross affirms that the c-channel is vital for the Wrigley brand, and has been for a century – and he refers to a recent report that the channel is going to outgrow the rest of the market, disproportionately in terms of growth over the next five years, making it an even more attractive distribution point for the company

"It is massively important for us,” he affirms, “and we're excited to work with retailers who provide the right products and the right visibility through merchandising, and the insights we have there and disrupting those shoppers in store.

I conjure an ideal customer: the impulse shopper, in convenience, preferably older, but most likely younger – because in order to expand penetration in that younger cohort, Wrigley is concentrating more on fruit flavours than previously on minty flavours for refreshment, because youth prefers it – and catch them young, as they say!

"When we look at the penetration we see across all demographics or age groups, we see a good amount of penetration. There's no one area, one age, where nobody chews gum,” Ross explains.

“However, younger shoppers are a massive focus for us, because younger shoppers actually chew more. Teenagers chew three times more than your average other shopper. And it's critical that we introduce people into this category at an earlier age, because then they will become lifetime chewers. Fruit flavours are growing the fastest, double the rate of the category [at 8.9 per cent value], so that's been a key focus: how can we introduce more exciting flavours to cater to that growth?

Fruit flavours do indeed seem to be everywhere. In vape, for example, it seems everything is fruit. Perhaps that refers back to the personal and identity concept of well-being that gum-chewing can communicate inwardly – and outwardly, too.

Breaking it down

No more the Juicy Fruit of old, the Spearmint of cherished memory, at least on these shores,

“In the UK, we have three brands now," Ross explains. “We have Extra – it's called Orbit in certain markets outside of the UK. In the UK, Extra is our biggest brand, about 85 per cent of our revenue.

“Our second biggest brand in the UK is Airwaves. Airwaves, obviously, has that very unique mental kick, all about intense invigoration.

“And then the third brand is Hubba Bubba, I love Hubba Bubba. As you said, you know, coming into this role and mentioning Hubba Bubba to people, you always get that kind of reaction around, "Oh yeah, I used to chew that when I was younger, all those kinds of nostalgia. And as you said, it’s about blowing bubbles, and that's often how people first discover the category, through bubble gum, because it's all about fun – bubbles and flavour.

As marketers say, after distribution comes segmentation; so likewise, brands are followed by formats.

"We have three pack formats, singles, bottle and multi-pack, and all those are catering to slightly different usage occasions,” and this is vital to note for merchandising and maximising sales.

“Singles are more about on-the-go consumption," says Ross. “When you're out and about the bottle is used for a variety of reasons. Often people put it in the car cup-holder.

“And then the multipack is more like, buy it, keep it at home. And then when you're going out you can take it.

"Those are our three pack formats, and then within that we've got a very wide array of flavours, because choice is extremely important to the gum shopper.”

With at least four major angles from which to promote gum in the wellness category, does Ross think the gum industry is soft-pedalling that so far? Could it do more on that to grow share by taking it from other categories, or is gum simply growing incrementally in any case?

“We see that from a consumer usage occasion perspective that there's some unique ways people buy and consume gum that are hard to are hard to satisfy with other products,” he says.

“There will be moments where people will go into a store and instead of grabbing a bar of something, they might say, ‘Hey, you know what? I just want a little bit of flavour. I want a little bit of kick. And I want something sweet in my mouth. I'm going to take some fruit gum.’ There will be those instances. Broadly speaking, because of how impulsive and how incremental gum is, and how unique it is, a lot if not most growth will be completely incremental to any retailer.”

Given that, what would Ross’s advice be in terms of merchandising for the average retailer who perhaps doesn't have a huge store. What would be the ideal setup that Wrigley would recommend to c-store retailers to get the best gum sales?

“I would start with, what range do you have?” he muses. “What's the range of brands? Do you have the right breadth of brands? Do you have the right breadth of pack formats, because those all those cater for different needs? What's the breadth of flavours you have? Again, fruit gum: are you stocking enough fruit gum? Because some retailers might be too overstocked in terms of mint flavours, but in fact you want to have a nice variety of mints and fruits where you're catering to different shoppers.

“And then in terms of merchandising, I'd look at things like your fixture. What does your fixture look like? Are you maximizing the space that you have in store? Within the convenience channel, there are very many different sizes, layouts, types of stores, but we're passionate about working with retailers and shop owners to discover how we can tailor our equipment in a way that is you perfectly designed for your store.

“The latest technology we have can make the displays fit whatever space that you have. If you've got a tiny space, we'll give you a unit that will fit perfectly into there. We can be as big or as small as the retailer wants. And then what's crucial to remember is that gum is an impulsive product. How do you disrupt in-store? If people are going into a store and they're not planning to buy gum, you need to disrupt them. That means point-of-sale material is critically important, and that's something we can help with as well.

“Obviously, we produce a lot of POS, and we're really keen to work with retailers to make sure they have the right materials to disrupt the shopper, through signage. And then lastly, NPD. Are you maximizing the NPD that that's coming into market?”

That cues up perfectly the latest Wrigley exclusive just available now, and exclusive to the c-channel: two new Extra Refreshers price marked packs (PMPs), in Tropical and Bubblemint flavour, in 30-piece bottles and soft chew format.

The new PMPs support retailers by enabling them to maximise the Extra Refreshers sales in the channel – 90 per cent of shoppers haven’t tried Refreshers and yet 70 per cent of all Refreshers fruit volume is incremental to the category – as Ross pointed out.

“The benefits of PMPs are well known – they offer a quick price comparison and can capture the impulse shopper’s attention to drive retailers’ incremental sales,” says Ross, delivering on this by providing trending flavours that communicate value to the shopper.

“This is a hugely exciting time for the category and the Extra Refreshers brand. This year, we are putting a multimillion media investment behind our fruit gum range, including Extra Refreshers PMPs, to bring the product benefits to life and support sales within the convenience channel.”

The Extra Refreshers PMP bottles are in wholesalers with an RRP of £2.50, so go get ’em now!