In With The New…

Today is a big day at Peppersmith HQ. After a huge amount of hard work and what must have been hundreds of product trials, we’re finally ready to launch our new gum.

While the old gum had plenty of fans, there were some important things that you told us you wanted fixed. And it’s great to be able to now tell you that we’ve fixed them. Here’s what’s changed and why…

Hello Flavour

Making gum is so tricky, especially when avoiding flavour enhancers like aspartame. The flavour of our old gum was quite short lived so we have a new recipe that holds the flavour much better. And because we still use fine English peppermint it’s a lovely, clean, natural peppermint taste.

Bye bye Chicle

The old gum was made using a natural rubber called chicle. This is a nice idea but in reality it became unsustainable. Lots of people didn’t like the variable texture, it was bad at holding flavour and it had a nasty habit of sticking to caps and false teeth. The only real benefit was the provenance of it being rainforest sourced but we’d really struggled to get close enough to the ingredient to make sure this was as good as it sounded. We’ve now switched to a base that contains natural rubber mixed with man-made, food-grade rubber. As a result the new gum has much better flavour, a better texture and is overall just a much better product. Gum base is completely inert and all the other ingredients that you do ‘eat’ (which make up over 70% of each piece) are still naturally derived.

Better packaging

Our number one complaint by far was that the packs kept coming open in people’s bags. To stop this we’ve added a little tab that can be tucked in to keep the lid securely shut. Our old gum also came with a booklet of papers to wrap used gum in. We stand by the idea and it was a genuine attempt to help prevent gum litter. The reality is though we heard most people weren’t using them and we’ve had plenty of complaints that they meant our gum was over-packaged. Those not using them were also unhappy they were having to pay the significant cost they added (around 20p). We’ve therefore taken the papers out of the packs, brought down the price by the same amount and anyone still wanting wrappers can get in touch and we will send them some for free.

Clearer labelling

Our mission is to make the healthiest gum around and because we use 100% xylitol, ours is proven to actively reduce plaque. This is a very important proven benefit and we’ve now stuck it on the front of the pack to make sure it’s clear to one and all.

As you can see we’ve made some big changes. As usual we carefully considered every one of them and it’s nice to now say we’ve gone a long way towards sorting out the things you most wanted improved. No doubt there are still more improvements to make and we’ll keep striving to make them.

You can buy the new gum from our webshop here.

If you have any questions at all about the changes, you can email us or give us a call on 020 8788 2080.

EDIT: 26 March 2015

Us again. Thanks for all your comments. We know that some people are disappointed that we’ve stopped using chicle. We never ever want to disappoint anyone. But that is why we had to make the changes. While some of you may have been able to overlook the old gum’s shortcomings, plenty of other people weren’t, which meant complaints and ultimately not enough people liked the old gum to enable us to continue making it. So to be clear – regardless of whether we launched a new gum, we had to stop the old stuff.

Having said all that, we’re really proud of the new gum. It tastes much better and is so much healthier than the bigger brand gum because it’s proven to reduce plaque and free from aspartame.

Oh and finally no for those asking, no it is not cheaper to make – we have brought the price down because we’ve stopped using the very expensive papers.

PS Sorry for the delay in answering your comments. We are a very small team and things are super busy at the moment.

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