What Exactly Is Bubblegum Flavor — and Why Pink?

On this episode of Our American Stories, we all know the look and taste of bubblegum, but few people know where it came from. The first bubblegum was invented in 1928 by Walter Diemer, who used the only food dye available: pink. That color stuck, and so did the flavor — a blend of fruit notes now simply called “bubblegum.” Simon Whistler, from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister podcast, The Brain Food Show, shares the story of how bubblegum was created and how a simple candy became a lasting invention of the 20th century.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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 nineteen twenty eight.
Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the
Today I found Out YouTube channel and its sister, the

(00:33):
Brain Food Show podcast. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Bubble gum, the ambiguously flavored, obnoxiously pink candy gum is
the favorite treat of violence. Beauregart. Now this little number or.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Such as are violet?

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

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

Speaker 4 (00:51):
What happened? Violent?

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Were the gum true? Normally? But when I heard about
these ticket things wong as I laid off the gum
and switched to candy bars instead. Now, of course, I'm
right back on gum. I chewed all day except at
meal times when I stick a pian 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 Corneia Prince Metal and why

(01:15):
she mad? How con you yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Why is speaking mut On here? From a moment?

Speaker 2 (01:19):
So first the story of how bubble gum became the
thing at all. In nineteen twenty eight, Waterdimer was working
as an accountant for the now to funct candy and
baseball card manufacturer Flea. At this time, Flair was struggling
financially when then presidents of the company, Gilbert Muston, hit
upon the idea of creating his own gum base to

(01:41):
improve profit margins. At the time, they bought their gum
products from another manufacturer before repackaging it and selling it.
Towards this ends, must And 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 rather the third. Accordingly, whenever
must And was called away, Dimer, who worked in an

(02:02):
office next door, was called upon to watch over the
latest gunbatch or land a hand when necessary. Over time,
Mustin began to trust the twenty three year old accountants
to such an extent that he was allowed to experiment
on his own time a perk, Dimer took frequent advantage
of often spending many hours after a shift mixing random
flavors together and tinkering with the flear gum based recipe

(02:23):
in order to improve it. Dimer 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. Diamer's goal was always to create a

(02:43):
kind of gum you could blow bubbles with. So while
it's nice to think that Dimer accidentally mixed a bunch
of chemicals together and stumbled across a lotto 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

(03:05):
not to repeat when mixed again. Dimer's inspiration for bubblegum
was an earlier, never released prototype product created by Flear's founder,
Frank H. Fleer. This was created in nineteen oh six
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

(03:27):
wet and had poor elasticity. This resulted in any bubbles
you've managed to blow popping quickly, splattering saliva everywhere, and
then adhering tightly to your face and lips. While Diamer'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

(03:47):
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 hardened up
within a matter of hours after being made. It was
this problem that was eventually accidentally fixed by Diner, though
he never publicly mentioned how he fixed it or why

(04:08):
the solution was supposedly accidentally stumbled upon him. Today, wax
is typically added to gum to keep it soft at
room temperature, and some form of powder like corn starches
used to keep it from becoming too sticky, whatever the case.
After inventing bubblegum, Dimer scaled up the recipe and created
three hundred pounds of it. This brings us to why
bubble gum is nearly always pink. According to Dimer, when

(04:32):
the time came to add food colouring too his first
proper batch of bubblegum, the only colouring 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
tricee available to him, Dimer poured an entire bottle of

(04:54):
pink food colouring into the mixer, giving the candy it's
now iconic, obnoxiously loud colouration. Over the years, as more
companies attempted to create competing products, they similarly colored it pink,
leading to it becoming the go to colour for bubblegum. Ultimately,
Flea settled on the name double Bubble for the product
and deciding to individually package the candy in a manner

(05:14):
not too dissimilar to how pieces of taffy are traditionally sold,
and then sent one hundred sample pieces to a small
store located at twenty six Chemek Taddy Street, Philadelphia. The
score sold out within a day, prompting Flear to make
several more tons of the bubble gum and begin widely
marketing it. In the first year of bubblegum sales alone,
Flear sold one point five million dollars worth of the gun,

(05:36):
which is about twenty one million dollars to day, literally
saving the company, though Dymer 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, Flair promptly fired Dimer from his role
as company accountant and made him an executive of sales.

(05:58):
His job then included training salesmen on how to blow
bubbles so they could demonstrate the product to potential customers.
Originally priced that just a penny, bubblegum proved to be
immensely popular with depression eury customers, and as a result,
Diimer'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

(06:20):
most financially taxing times in American history. While he received
no royalties from the product, as the years passed, Dimer
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 fifteen years after he retired in
nineteen seventy. Even after retiring, Dimer's love for bubblegum never socided,

(06:44):
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 Flear, to local children. He also reportedly occasionally
invited neighborhood children over to his house for bubblegum blowing parties.
According to Diamer's second wife, Florence, who he married at

(07:06):
the age of ninety one, his first wife, Adelaide, died
in nineteen ninety four, years after their two children both
died in nineteen eighty six, 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

(07:27):
of ninety two on January the ninth, nineteen eighty eight,
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 Flair was intentionally never elaborated upon,
and the recipe is now considered to be a trade

(07:49):
secret in the same day as products like Coca cola
and pepsi. That said, the original ingredients list included sugar,
Dextro's corns syrup, gum based 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 Diner, who claims he originally used a

(08:12):
combination of winter green, 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 contests 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

(08:34):
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?

Speaker 4 (08:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
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 Dimer and in nineteen twenty eight, well,
he had to try and figure out some way to
save his company, and he did and the whole notion

(09:18):
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 times 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, Doubble Bubble. By the way,

(09:40):
we've done many food stories, Fanny Farmer, Little Debbie, Fast Food,
Pigly Wiggly, Jelly Belly, Trader, Joe's, even Bucky's is kind
of a food story. The story of Bubblegum here on
our American Stories