What is the Fruit in Juicy Fruit Gum?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]With a brand's recognition rate among the highest of any product in the Western world, it's a pretty safe bet to say that most people watching this video have heard of Juicy Fruit gum, if not also chewed it at some point. The question we're looking at today, though, is exactly what is Juicy Fruit supposed to taste like? And does it actually contain any dehydrated juice from that fruit? Now, you'd think that answering this question would be as simple as picking up a pack of Juicy Fruit and reading the ingredients list. But as with most things in life, it's just not that easy. For starters, the ingredients listed on a pack of Juicy Fruit gum are incredibly vague. The only real piece of useful information you can glean from a pack itself is that the gum contains natural and artificial flavors. Helpful.

[00:00:46]This also isn't helped by the fact that Wrigley, the company who make Juicy Fruit, are similarly koi about discussing what goes into their product, often choosing to refrain from mentioning any specific fruit in regards to its flavor and excusing this evasive behavior by stating that the flavor is a trade secret. That said, with a little digging, you'll find that in the past, Wrigley has explicitly stated that Juicy Fruit contains notes of lemon, orange, pineapple, and banana in response to emails from curious customers asking for more specific information about Juicy Fruit's flavor. Again, though, this isn't entirely helpful in discerning whether or not the gum actually contains fruit juice since always awesome science has made it possible to synthesize almost any flavor we want. Curiously, there is a fruit out there that is known to taste almost exactly like juicy fruit. A lesserk known fruit from the shores of Africa and Asia known as jackf fruit. Jackf fruit tastes so much like juicy fruit gum that it is often one of the first things mentioned when it's discussed by Western media and there is a small but nonetheless dedicated subset of people who believe that it is the key secret ingredient in the gum. However, although jackfruit does taste like Juicy Fruit gum, this isn't because Juicy Fruit contains jackf fruit. A dead giveaway being that there are no records of Wrigley importing the fruit or the juice. The real reason the two taste and smell so similar is because they both probably contain a chemical called isoamlac acetate. The reason we have to say probably is because as noted, Wrigley won't confirm exactly what goes into making Juicy Fruit, which is their right as a company. But experts are still pretty sure that isalacetate has something to do with Juicy Fruit. One of the most compelling arguments for isoamacetate being the primary flavoring agent behind Juicy Fruit is that like jackf fruit, the chemical is said to smell very similar to it. Even in literature that doesn't mention juicy fruit by name, isoamalacetate is said to have a indistinct, almost indescribably fruity smell that contains hints of banana, peach, and other similarly sweet fruits, which is pretty much the exact same way people who haven't eaten jackf fruit describe juicy fruit. Making this argument even more tantalizing is that historically, one of the few ways to obtain isoamlac acetate in commercially viable quantities was as a byproduct of whiskey production. When Wrigley first began producing juicy fruit gum in 1893, they did so from a factory in Illinois, the biggest whiskey state in America at the time, suggesting that perhaps Wriggley sourced isoamelacetate and hence Juicy Fruit's unique flavor from the many factories producing whiskey nearby. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence of all about Juicy Fruit's flavor being the result of artificially created chemicals instead of real fruit is that they themselves used to explicitly advertise the artificial flavor of their product as a unique selling point up until a few decades ago. You see, early packs of Juicy Fruit starting around the 1940s carried the slogan the gum with the fascinating artificial flavor, which they used as a way of enticing customers to try it. It is only in recent years with the trend to avoid artificial chemicals in consumables that Wrigley has shied away from advertising the fact that Juicy Fruit's unique flavor is in all likelihood the result of artificially created chemicals rather than a cocktail of chemicals directly extracted from fruit.