Bubble Gum -How is made

Chewing gum dates back to the ancient greeks that chewed resin from trees. Modern gum was patented in the US in 1869,

by believe it or not, a dentist. In 1928, another American invented bubblegum.

Bubblegum comes in gum balls of all colors and sizes, but for blowing bubbles, nothing beats the chewy, gooey, pink stuff in the twist wrap. It all starts with a gum base, the stuff that makes gum chewy. Traditionally, the base came from tree resin. Today, it’s synthetic, made of plastics and rubbers.

They pour the gum base into a mixer, then add coloring and flavoring. As it begins mixing they pour in glucose syrup, a sweetner. Because it is a liquid, it helps to keep the gumbase soft. Next, they add dextrose, a powder sweetner. They blend the ingrediants for about twenty minutes. The stirring action builds up heat, which melts everything together.

The mixture is ready when it reaches the consistency of bread dough. They transfer it by cart to a machine called the preextruder. The machine squeezes the mixture through a narrow opening, like squeezing toothpaste from a tube. This transforms the bug bulky wad into thin manageable strips that can then go through the extruders. The extruders squeeze each strip down to the actual width of a piece of bubble gum. It comes out as one long continuous string, to be cut into bite size pieces later on. This extrusion process heats up the gum. If they were to cut and wrap it now it would stick to the wrapper. So the next stop is the cooling chamber. The gum goes in for fifteen minutes with temperatures between 37 and 45 degrees fahrenheit.

When the bubble gum comes out, it is cooled down enough for what they call the cut and wrap. One machine does both jobs in a fraction of a second. As the continuos string enters on one end, the machine cuts it into bite size pieces, pushes each piece into a bite size wrapper, then twists both ends of the wrapper closed. The machine processes 900 pieces of bubble gum in a minute.

Last stop, packaging. The bubble gum moves out onto a scale that automatically weighs out the right amount into a tub. The seal the tub with plastic to make it airtight. This keeps the bubble gum fresh.

Ever wonder why bubblegum os pink? That is because it was the only color Walter Demer when he invented the streak back in 1928. Since then the color just stuck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z69N3zwJUIE&feature=related