At a glance

One gum, two names, and hundreds of impostors

Every fact in this table is attributed to a named source, and every date is stated. Details checked 29 August 2026; companies change, and if Nathan & Sons shows us anything here is wrong or outdated, we will correct it.

Part 1

The company Reddit never mentions

Here is the strange thing about typing "Nathan and Sons gum" into Reddit's search bar: the company that sold a reported thirty million dollars of gum barely exists there. The threads exist, plenty of them, but they are filed under the product name. In the eleven threads our Underbrush Reddit digest read in full, spanning r/Teethcare, r/Scams, r/gum, r/askdentists, r/DentalHygiene, r/BuyCanadian and r/justyourvintagegirl, the company name appears mostly as the store you are told to buy from and the branding you are told to check for on the box. Nobody discusses the business. No founder AMA, no thread about the company's history, no discussion of its sales channels or its legal fights.

That gap is worth filling, because the company's story explains most of what the threads argue about. So here is the file, from named sources.

Nathan & Sons was founded in 2022 by Nate Mal, born Nathan Malonson, a former executive chef who moved from kitchens into consumer products. The company is registered as a Wyoming LLC with a registered-agent address in Cheyenne, a common setup for US e-commerce businesses. For over a year the brand was tiny. Then Mal posted a TikTok video promoting the gum over Thanksgiving weekend 2023, the video went viral, and the company hard-launched in January 2024 into demand it had not planned for. By the time Modern Retail profiled the company in September 2025, Underbrush had, per the company, surpassed thirty million dollars in sales.

The trademark record backs the timeline. According to the USPTO filings we pulled for our Nathan & Sons comparison, the UNDERBRUSH word mark was registered on 1 July 2025 under registration number 7850981, with first use claimed from April 2023, months before the viral video. A second application, for NATHAN & SONS UNDERBRUSH REMINERALIZING GUM, was filed on 31 January 2025 under serial number 99024763 and was still pending when we checked. Trademark registrations do not tell you whether a gum works, but they do tell you a real legal entity spent real money defending a real name, which matters for the next part of this story.

Why does the naming split matter for a Reddit search? Because search results are only as good as the words people file their experiences under. Someone who chewed the gum and wants to talk about it posts about "Underbrush". Someone who got a suspicious box and wants to warn others posts about "Underbrush". The company name on their credit-card statement might say something else entirely, and the box in their hands might be from a manufacturer the company has never heard of. If you searched for the company and found this page instead of threads, that is the reason, and the fix is simple: read the discussion under the product's name, ideally with the label data next to it. Our digest does exactly that, and our wider remineralizing-gum Reddit roundup puts the Underbrush conversation next to what Reddit says about every other gum in the category.

Part 2

Why every review of this gum is a coin flip

If you take one thing from this page, take this: before you weigh any review of Underbrush, on Reddit or anywhere else, you have to ask which gum the reviewer actually chewed. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the company's own account of its biggest problem, on the record, twice.

In September 2025, Mal told Modern Retail that more than 800 knock-off Underbrush brands had appeared over the previous two years. Copycat sellers took the brand's packaging, imagery and ad campaigns and sold their own product underneath them. Fighting this, he said, had cost the company "over a million dollars excluding the ads and registration fees", with trademark fees, registrations and replacement product for affected customers totalling an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 dollars of that. At the peak of the problem, the company was receiving about 20 direct messages and comments a day on Instagram from customers asking about fake products they had received. By the time of the interview that figure was down to three to five a day. Three to five a day is a success story, by this brand's standards.

Forbes picked the story up in April 2026 with a concrete example of how the fakes reach people. A buyer ordered through a Facebook ad for "Forrest Folk remineralizing gum" and received packages labeled KOZED UNDERBRUSH and WEBLINK UNDERBRUSH, manufactured by companies in Guangdong Province with no connection to the brand. Mal's frustration in that piece is about exactly the review-distortion problem this section describes: "People still reach out saying, I tried your stuff and it sucks. It's not our gum." And the damage runs the other way too, in his telling, with would-be customers who "will say, I got scammed already, so I don't want to take the risk."

Now connect that to Reddit. Two of the eleven threads in our digest sit on r/Scams, and both, read carefully, are about counterfeit boxes bought through copycat sites and marketplace sellers, not about the company. One describes near-identical packaging with different fonts and misspellings; the other dissects a lookalike site's tells. Several product-experience threads include commenters telling an unhappy chewer that the texture they describe sounds like a fake. This is the review-distortion machine running in public view: a category where an unknown share of one-star experiences were had with a product the company never made, and where the company's authentic gum inherits the reputation of 800 impostors.

We want to be plain about what this does and does not mean. It does not mean every complaint about Underbrush is really about a fake; the threads our digest read contain plenty of people who clearly bought the real gum from the official store and simply disliked the firm resin chew or the fast-fading flavour, and their experiences are as valid as anyone's. It means the signal is noisy in a specific, documented direction, and that any review, positive or negative, that does not say where the box came from is missing the single most important piece of context in this brand's universe.

Part 3

What the threads talk about, and what they skip

We are not going to re-quote the threads here. Our Underbrush Reddit digest already does that properly: eleven threads read in full, every quote verbatim and attributed, every thread linked, and three factual errors in the discussion corrected with sources. Duplicating that page would serve nobody. What belongs here is the shape of the conversation, because the shape is the finding.

The discussion clusters into five topics. Chew texture: the pieces are small and firm, and most people chew two or three at once, which splits users into those who love a firm resin chew and those who abandon it. Flavour: the recurring complaint is that it fades within a minute, leaving a resin aftertaste people describe in tree terms. Price: a premium gum at a premium price, and the threads notice. Counterfeits: the topic of both r/Scams threads and a running background hum in the others, with users comparing boxes and pointing out the tells of fakes. And safety: a run of questions on r/askdentists and r/gum about whether nano-hydroxyapatite is safe to swallow, most of which received almost no expert engagement, and one of which turned into a genuinely good myth-correction thread.

Notice what is missing from that list. There is no discussion of the company: nothing on its founder, its channels, its trademark fight, its interviews. There is also, across several hundred comments, not a single request for the number that would let anyone judge the product on paper: the milligrams of hydroxyapatite in a piece. Reddit is excellent at mouthfeel and at spotting fake boxes. It never audits a label. That is not a criticism of Reddit; it is a description of what forums are for. But it means "what Reddit says" about this gum is, in total, a texture review plus a counterfeit warning, and every deeper question is exported unanswered to pages like this one.

One more absence worth naming. Between our digest, our Underbrush review and the searches run for this page, we found no substantial Reddit thread about the Nathan & Sons subscription, its customer service, or its ads, under either name. We flag this because a "what Reddit says" page owes you its blank spots as much as its findings. If such threads exist under names we did not search, our accuracy promise at the bottom of this page applies: show us and we will update.

Part 4

How to read a review when 800 fakes exist

Most "what Reddit says" pages stop at summarizing threads. In this category, that is not enough, because the counterfeit problem changes how much any individual post can tell you. So before the science section, here is the method we use when we read these threads ourselves, as five questions you can apply to any post about this gum, or frankly about any brand in a category this cloned.

First: where did the box come from? This is the sorting question, and most posts never answer it. A review that starts "ordered from the official site" and a review that starts "saw it on a Facebook ad" are describing two different supply chains, and per the Forbes reporting, the second one has a documented record of delivering product the company never made. When a post does not say, treat the experience as real and the attribution as unknown. That single habit dissolves most of the apparent contradiction between glowing and furious reviews of the same product.

Second: is the reviewer describing the product or the outcome? Texture, flavour, how many pieces they chew, whether the piece softens: a stranger on the internet is a perfectly good instrument for measuring those, and the threads our digest read are rich in exactly that. "My teeth feel stronger after six weeks" is a different kind of claim. Enamel mineral change is not observable at home, at any timescale, with any product, ours included. Posts reporting it, in either direction, are reporting expectation as much as chemistry, which is why the one timed follow-up in the digest, reporting no noticeable change at six weeks, is best read as honest rather than damning.

Third: is the claim about the ingredient or the finished gum? Threads regularly cite hydroxyapatite research as if it settled the product question. It cannot, in either direction, while the dose per piece is unpublished. A study on a toothpaste at a known concentration tells you about that toothpaste; it transfers to a gum only if you know how much of the active the gum delivers, and for Underbrush you do not. The same discipline applies to us, which is why we publish our dose and still tell you no finished-gum trial exists.

Fourth: when was the post written? The counterfeit wave has a timeline: viral video late 2023, hard launch January 2024, peak fake-confusion around 2024 and 2025 by the founder's own Instagram-DM numbers, and a decline after the trademark registered in mid 2025 and enforcement spun up. A confused post from the peak period sits in a different information environment from one written after the brand's spotting guide circulated. Reddit search does not sort by that context; a careful reader has to add it back.

Fifth: what evidence would change the answer? For the taste-and-texture debate, nothing needs to change; that is preference. For everything else, the list is short and concrete: a published milligram dose, a public certificate of analysis, a clinical trial on the finished gum. The moment any of those appears, half the open questions on this page close. Until then, be suspicious of any post, or any article, that talks as if they were already closed.

One last asymmetry to hold in mind: people who get burned post, people who quietly reorder mostly do not. In a brand universe with hundreds of impostor storefronts, the posting population and the buying population can look very different, and the founder's own numbers, twenty complaint DMs a day at the peak against a reported thirty million dollars in sales, are a measure of exactly that gap. Forums are a magnifying glass on the unluckiest buyers. Useful, as long as you remember what you are looking through.

Part 5

The questions no thread can settle

Does the gum remineralize teeth? Nobody on Reddit knows, and the honest answer is that nobody outside the company can know, because two pieces of data are missing. First, no clinical trial on the finished Underbrush gum has been published. Second, the brand does not publish the milligrams of hydroxyapatite per piece; the Underbrush row in our hydroxyapatite gum database has carried "not disclosed" in the dose column since we first checked it in July 2026. Without a dose, even the ingredient-level science cannot be mapped onto the product.

The ingredient-level science, for the record, is real but bounded. A controlled, double-blind 2014 trial by Porciani and colleagues found that a chewing gum containing calcium hydroxyapatite reduced dentin hypersensitivity versus a placebo gum over two weeks, with 107 participants chewing two pieces three times a day. A 2023 in-situ study by Hassani and colleagues measured mineral content changes in human tooth specimens worn in the mouth while participants used a hydroxyapatite-impregnated resin gum. Chen and colleagues' 2021 review in Materials surveys hydroxyapatite across oral-care products, and Limeback, Enax and Meyer's 2023 systematic review found supportive clinical evidence for fluoride-free hydroxyapatite toothpastes, a different product format from gum. On the sweetener side, the 2015 Cochrane review by Riley and colleagues found the evidence for xylitol products preventing caries to be low quality and inconclusive, which matters because chewing any sugar-free gum stimulates saliva, and saliva, not marketing, does a lot of the work in this category. All five papers are linked in the references with their PubMed IDs so you can read them without trusting us.

Is the gum safe? The safety questions in the r/askdentists threads mostly went unanswered there, which is a shame because this one has a real answer. The EU's Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety published its opinion on nano-hydroxyapatite in 2023, concluding it safe in the toothpaste and mouthwash concentrations it assessed; gum as a format was not part of that assessment, a distinction our digest walks through in detail alongside the one mouse-cell study that fuels the scare posts. For a swallowed product, formats and doses matter, which brings every safety question back to the same undisclosed number as the efficacy question.

Is the company good to its customers? Reddit is nearly silent, so the only structured signal we have found is Trustpilot, and it is thin. When we checked on 27 August 2026 for our Nathan & Sons comparison, the brand's Trustpilot profile showed 2.7 out of 5 from just 14 reviews, 57 percent of them one star and 29 percent five star. We would caution against reading much in either direction into 14 reviews of a company with thirty million dollars in reported sales, especially in a brand universe where, as Part 2 showed, an unknown share of angry customers were burned by impostors. What the number does tell you is that almost nobody who buys this gum reviews it anywhere structured, which makes the counterfeit noise proportionally louder.

Part 6

The columns you can actually check

Since we sell a competing gum, the fairest thing we can do is put both brands in the same table, restrict it to facts you can verify yourself, and link the receipts. Here is that table. Where a cell says "not disclosed", that is a statement about what is published, not an accusation; brands are free to keep their formulation private, and readers are free to weigh that.

If dose numbers are the column you care about, our data page on how many milligrams of hydroxyapatite are in each gum compares every brand that discloses one, and our label-by-label test of remineralizing gums runs the same audit across the whole category.

Part 7

In fairness to Nathan & Sons

A competitor's page about another brand owes that brand a fairness section, so here is ours, and it is not hard to write. Nathan & Sons effectively created the mainstream market for remineralizing gum in the US; every brand that came after, including the wave of clones, exists because one chef's TikTok video found an audience nobody was serving. When the clones arrived, the company did the expensive, unglamorous thing: registered its marks, hired brand-protection help, and by its own account spent over a million dollars and replaced product for customers who had been burned by fakes it did not make. Its founder gives interviews under his own name and answers uncomfortable questions about the problem in public. None of that is trivial, and none of it is what a fly-by-night operation does.

Our criticisms are the ones this page has already made, and they are about disclosure, not legitimacy: no published dose, no published certificate of analysis, no trial on the finished product. Those are choices we think the category needs to grow out of, which is why we built our own brand around publishing the numbers. Reasonable people can weigh privacy against verifiability differently. Everything here was checked on 29 August 2026 against the sources named; if Nathan & Sons publishes a dose tomorrow, this page gets updated, and gladly.

The one that prints its numbers

A remineralizing gum that shows you the dose

Minvelle publishes what most gums on this page do not: 5.7 mg nano-hydroxyapatite and 817 mg xylitol per piece, with the certificate of analysis and the full formula on its transparency page. One piece a day, 18 pieces per box, alongside brushing, never instead of it.

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