At a glance

One company, two names, no gum

The fastest way to understand what happened is to put the two eras of the same business side by side. Everything in this table comes from sources listed at the end of the article: founder profiles from the gum years, the February 2024 PRNewswire release, WHOIS records, and what the companies' own pages showed when we captured them on August 29, 2026.

Sources for every row are listed at the end of the article. Captured August 29, 2026; company pages change over time.

Part 1

What Project 7 actually was

Project 7 launched in 2008, founded by Tyler Merrick, and it belonged to a very specific moment in American consumer goods. This was the era of the cause-related brand, when a pair of shoes bought a pair of shoes for someone else and a bottle of water funded a well. Project 7's version of the idea was gum and mints. The name referred to seven areas of need the company said it supported with a share of its profits: Save the Earth, House the Homeless, Feed the Hungry, Quench the Thirsty, Heal the Sick, Teach Them Well, and Hope for Peace. Buy a pack of gum, do a small good thing. That framing is consistent across the profiles written about the brand during its gum years, from a 2016 Food Business News piece to a 2017 Forbes profile to an alumni feature by the Texas A&M Foundation, all of which describe Merrick as the founder of the gum and mint company.

The product itself was not a dental product and never pretended to be. Project 7 made sugar-free gourmet gum, sweetened with xylitol, and its personality lived entirely in the flavors. Birthday Cake. Front Porch Lemonade. Rainbow Ice. Spearmint Farms. Fairytale Fruit. These were dessert names, vacation names, names designed for an impulse grab at a register, and they worked. The gum sold through Amazon, through Walmart, through the Texas grocery chain H-E-B, and through wholesale and breakroom-supply channels that put it in offices across the country. If you remember Project 7 fondly, you probably remember a specific flavor, and you are probably remembering it from a checkout lane or a snack drawer rather than a pharmacy shelf.

That distinction matters for the rest of this story. On this blog we usually review gum through a dental lens: what active ingredient, what dose, what evidence. Project 7 sat outside that conversation entirely. It was a candy-adjacent treat with a mission statement, competing on taste and feeling, not on enamel chemistry. Nobody chewed Fairytale Fruit because of a remineralization study, and the brand, to its credit, never claimed anyone should. Which is exactly why what happened next was so easy to miss: when a dental brand disappears, its users notice immediately, because a routine breaks. When a flavor brand disappears, people just drift to another flavor, and the question of what actually happened can go unanswered for years.

And people clearly kept asking. Search interest in Project 7 gum never fully died, because a product that lived in thousands of stores leaves a long memory. The searches that remain are the reason this article exists: what happened to Project 7 gum, was it discontinued, where can I still buy it, and, increasingly, whether the site that now answers those searches can be trusted. We will take those in order, starting with the pivot the company itself never really narrated in public.

Part 2

The pivot nobody announced: Project 7 became Joyride

Somewhere around 2022, the company behind Project 7 changed shape. Not by shutting down, and not, as far as we could find, by publishing any farewell to the gum that built it, but by becoming a different brand with a different product line. The new name is Joyride Sweets, a candy company based in Austin. The cleanest primary source on the timeline is a PRNewswire wire release dated February 15, 2024, which states that Joyride Sweets was launched in 2022 by founder and CEO Tyler Merrick, the same Tyler Merrick who founded Project 7 in 2008, with a mission to provide better candy options: vegan, low sugar, low calorie, low carb, and non-GMO. The domain record agrees with the press release: WHOIS shows joyridesweets.com was created on January 31, 2022.

That same February 2024 release carried the news that made Joyride famous far beyond anyone who ever chewed Project 7: Ryan Trahan, one of YouTube's biggest creators, joined the company and was named Chief Creative Officer. Trade coverage from Nosh and the industry newsletter Creator's Blueprint describes the fuller arc: Joyride as the rebrand of Project 7, Trahan buying in as a co-owner in early 2024, the brand reaching a #1 candy-seller position at a major national retailer within months of its 2024 retail push, and a 30 million dollar Series A closing in June 2025. Merrick's continuity at the top is easy to verify in current sources too; a 2026 Adweek Brandweek speaker page lists Tyler Merrick as Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Joyride.

Here is the part that genuinely surprised us. Joyride's own story page, the page whose whole job is to tell you where the company came from, says the company was established in 2022 and does not mention Project 7 at all. Not the name, not the gum, not the fourteen years of history that preceded it. The current homepage leans into the creator era instead, framing Joyride as a candy company founded by Ryan Trahan. From a marketing standpoint you can see the logic; a fresh candy brand with a beloved YouTuber at the front is a cleaner story than a rebranded gum company from 2008. But it means the official record, as told by the company itself, simply skips the era that Project 7 customers remember. The bridge between the two brands exists in the infrastructure, not in the storytelling, and that is where we went looking next.

To be precise about what we are and are not claiming: we found no statement from the company announcing that Project 7 gum was discontinued, and we also found no statement explaining the transition. The absence of an announcement in our searching is not proof none was ever made. What we can show, with primary evidence anyone can reproduce, is that the company's own domain treats Project 7 and Joyride as one continuous business, and that gum is no longer part of it. That evidence is the next section.

Part 3

The receipts: what the domain and the records say

Company histories can be rewritten, but web infrastructure is honest in a way marketing pages are not. So on August 29, 2026, we checked the plumbing ourselves rather than relying on anyone's retelling, and the results are reproducible by any reader with a terminal or a WHOIS lookup tool.

First, the redirect. A request to project7.com returns an HTTP 301, the code for a permanent move, pointing to joyridesweets.com. The response even explains itself: the server includes a header reading x-redirect-reason: primary_domain_redirection. In plain language, the system serving Joyride's website is configured to treat project7.com as one of its own primary domains and forward it. That is not something an unrelated company can typically do; it requires control of the Project 7 domain. Second, the age of that domain. WHOIS shows project7.com was created on December 22, 1998, is registered through GoDaddy, and has been renewed through 2027. Someone is still paying to keep the old brand's front door standing, years after the gum left the shelves, precisely so that anyone who knocks gets walked over to the candy store.

Put those two facts next to the corporate record and the picture is complete. The same founder, Tyler Merrick, appears in gum-era profiles as the founder of Project 7 and in the 2024 wire release and 2026 conference listings as founder and CEO of Joyride Sweets. The old domain forwards permanently to the new brand. The new brand launched in 2022 per both the press release and the domain-creation date. Trade press describes the one as the rebrand of the other. Every independent thread, infrastructure, corporate filings of the press-release kind, and third-party coverage, ties the same knot: Project 7 did not die, it changed clothes.

What did die was the product category. Joyride's current lineup, as captured from its own homepage in August 2026, is sour strips, gummy worms, gummy busters, sour smacks, sour ropes and merchandise. There is no gum on the site. There is no gum on the redirected project7.com, because it is the same site. A business that once existed to sell gum with a mission now sells no gum at all, and that, more than any discontinuation notice, is the real answer to the question in this article's title.

Part 4

So is Project 7 gum discontinued? The honest answer

Discontinued is the word everyone searches, but it is subtly the wrong word, and the difference matters if you are trying to decide whether a pack you found online is worth buying. A discontinuation is an event: a company announces a product is ending, retailers sell through, and the record shows a date. What happened to Project 7 gum looks instead like a category exit. The company reoriented around candy under a new name, stopped talking about gum entirely, and let the old product line fade out of its own story. We could not find a recall, a safety notice, or a formal end-of-life announcement, and nothing in the public record suggests the gum went away for any reason other than a business choosing a bigger market.

The distinction is not academic. When a product is formally discontinued, you at least know its status. When a product is quietly orphaned, listings live on across dozens of retail and distributor systems with nobody responsible for tending them, and shoppers have no way to tell from a product page whether they are buying fresh inventory or stock that has been sitting in a warehouse since the brand stopped being a gum brand. That is precisely the situation the next section documents: Project 7 gum is simultaneously unavailable from its maker and still purchasable in several places, which is the most confusing possible state for a consumer product to be in.

It is worth saying plainly that none of this reflects badly on the company or the product. Businesses pivot, and by every trade account this one pivoted spectacularly well; reaching a top candy-seller position at national retail and raising a large Series A within roughly a year of relaunch is an outcome most founders never see. The gum did not fail so much as get outgrown. But the very success of the pivot is why the gum's afterlife is so untended, and why the story of what happened has been left for pages like this one, and less scrupulous pages we will get to shortly, to tell instead.

Part 5

Can you still buy Project 7 gum in 2026?

Yes, in places, and this is where a buyer should slow down. As of late August 2026 we found live Project 7 gum product pages on Walmart's website, on H-E-B's site, and at a business-to-business wholesale distributor called Snackathon Foods, plus assorted listings on Amazon. Individual flavors come and go across those listings, and we did not attempt to verify stock levels or freshness for any of them. What we can verify is the other side of the ledger: neither joyridesweets.com nor the redirected project7.com sells, lists, or so much as mentions gum. The brand's own current channels have nothing to do with these listings.

Our honest reading, and we flag it as a reading rather than a documented fact, is that what remains for sale is residual inventory moving through retail and distributor pipelines: stock produced before or during the transition that has simply not sold through yet. Wholesale channels in particular can carry slow-moving confectionery for a long time. We found nothing indicating current production, and a company whose entire public identity is now candy would have little reason to keep quietly manufacturing a gum line it never mentions.

If nostalgia has you reaching for a pack anyway, a few practical cautions apply to any gum of uncertain age, not to Project 7 specifically. Gum does not spoil the way dairy does, but it does degrade: the base hardens, flavors fade, and sugar-alcohol sweeteners can develop off notes. Check any best-by date in the listing photos, buy from a seller with a clear returns policy, and set your expectations accordingly; a flavor you loved in 2019 may not taste like your memory of it. And if what you actually miss is the ritual of a sweet, sugar-free chew rather than one specific flavor, the current market genuinely offers more interesting options than it did in Project 7's prime, which is where this story turns next after one important detour.

The detour is necessary because between you and those legacy listings sits a website that deserves its own section. If you searched for Project 7 gum recently, the odds are good the first thing you met was not Walmart, not H-E-B, and certainly not Joyride. It was a site called project7gum.com, and what the public record shows about it is the most cautionary part of this whole story.

Part 6

The site wearing the name: what project7gum.com actually is

Here is what the records show, stated carefully and attributed, because the site itself discloses almost nothing. According to WHOIS, the domain project7gum.com was created on August 13, 2025. That makes it about one year old as this article goes up, registered roughly three years after the real Project 7 had already become Joyride Sweets and stopped selling gum. It is registered through Dynadot with its name servers on Cloudflare, and the registration surfaces no organization name we could match to the original company. For comparison, the genuine article, project7.com, dates to 1998 and forwards to Joyride.

The site's own pages, as we captured them, are just as quiet about who is behind them. The footer contains no company name, no physical address, and no About, Contact or Privacy links. It carries two things: a generic line reading Copyright 2026 Project 7, and a disclosure stating participation in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, the affiliate scheme that pays commissions on referred purchases. Every Check Price button on the site routes the visitor out to an Amazon listing. At the time of writing, this site sat at or near the top of ordinary web searches for the brand name, which means it is, for many people, the first answer to the question this article exists to answer.

We want to be fair here, because fairness is the house style even when a subject makes it difficult. Affiliate publishing is a legal and common business model, and running a site about a defunct gum brand breaks no rule we know of. Nothing in what we found demonstrates who operates the site or what their intentions are, and we make no claim about either. What we can say, strictly from the record above, is this: the public evidence gives no indication that project7gum.com is connected to the company that made Project 7 gum, its domain was created long after that company left the category, and it identifies no owner a reader could check. A first search result that looks official, carries the brand's name in its address, and answers questions about the brand while naming no author is exactly the kind of source we built our own publishing standards against.

The practical takeaway costs you nothing: if you want the real company's side of this story, the authoritative address is the one the company itself maintains, project7.com, and following it will teach you the whole lesson in one click, because you will land on a candy store. For product questions, the retailers actually holding stock are the relevant pages. And for any site, about any brand, the two-minute habit that would have flagged this one instantly is the same habit we recommend for gum labels: look for the name, the address, and the way to reach a human, and treat their absence as information. We wrote about that habit at length in our Kreain review, where checking a brand's citations and company records changed the entire picture.

Part 7

Was Project 7 ever a dental gum? What it was, and was not

Because this is an oral-health blog, we owe you the dental context around the nostalgia. Project 7 was a sugar-free gum sweetened with xylitol, and that fact alone puts it on the right side of the most basic line in gum: sugar-free versus sugared. The American Dental Association's position on chewing gum is straightforward and worth knowing. Chewing any sugar-free gum stimulates saliva flow, and saliva is the mouth's own repair system, buffering the acids that follow eating and carrying the calcium and phosphate that enamel is built from. That benefit belongs to the act of sugar-free chewing itself, and Project 7 delivered it just as any quality sugar-free gum does.

The xylitol story deserves an honest telling rather than the inflated one it often gets. Xylitol is a sugar alcohol that the bacteria most associated with cavities cannot ferment into acid, which is a genuinely useful property. But when the Cochrane Collaboration reviewed xylitol-containing products for preventing cavities in 2015, the strongest evidence it found was for fluoride toothpaste with added xylitol, and it judged the evidence for other xylitol products, including gums and lozenges, insufficient to determine an effect. That does not mean xylitol gum does nothing; it means the confident percentage claims you sometimes see on gum marketing run ahead of what the reviewed evidence supports. Project 7, to its lasting credit, never made those claims. It put xylitol in the gum and sold you Birthday Cake, which is a more honest transaction than several dental-positioned brands we have reviewed since.

What Project 7 was not, and never claimed to be, was a therapeutic gum. It published no active dose for oral-health purposes, carried no remineralizing mineral, and made no enamel claims. The category that does make those claims, gums built around actives like nano-hydroxyapatite, the synthetic form of the calcium-phosphate crystal enamel is mostly made of, barely existed at retail during Project 7's prime and has since become its own crowded shelf. The evidence there is promising and still maturing: a 2022 systematic review in Clinical Oral Investigations by Wierichs and colleagues looked at ten human studies of hydroxyapatite products, mostly toothpastes, and found performance comparable to fluoride under remineralizing conditions, while stressing the evidence base is not yet conclusive. We map that whole landscape, brand by brand, in our remineralizing gum test for 2026.

The reason we draw the line between flavor gum and dental gum so firmly is that the two categories should be judged by different standards. A flavor gum owes you good taste and honest sweeteners, and Project 7 paid that debt in full. A dental gum owes you numbers: which active, how many milligrams per piece, what particle size, backed by what study. Those numbers are exactly what our reviews chase, and their absence is the most common failure we find; our Halo review and our guide to how many milligrams of hydroxyapatite a gum should contain both turn on precisely this question. Keep that lens; you are about to need it.

Part 8

If you chewed Project 7, here is your map now

People who loved Project 7 came to it for different reasons, and the honest replacement depends on which one was yours. If it was purely the flavors, the novelty sugar-free niche it pioneered still exists across many brands, and the surviving legacy listings from the last section are your only route to the originals while stock lasts. If it was the mission, the cause-related model that gave the brand its name, that era of the company ended with the rebrand as far as its public storytelling goes; the giving framework belonged to Project 7's identity, and Joyride's current pages tell a different story about better candy instead. Buyers who want their purchases to carry a mission will need to find it elsewhere, and happily, values-driven food brands are no longer rare.

If the reason was your teeth, even partly, then the market has genuinely moved past what Project 7 offered, and this is the one upgrade the intervening years handed you. The modern dental-gum shelf contains products that publish an active ingredient, a milligram dose per piece, and the lab paperwork behind both. It also contains products that publish none of that while making large claims, and telling the two apart is most of the work. The comparison below is the short version of the standard we apply in every review on this blog.

We hold our own product to the right-hand column in full, and if you want to see what that looks like in practice, you can try Minvelle with 10% off and check every number against the transparency page before the box arrives. For the wider field, our Milliways review and our comparison with Nathan & Sons show how differently brands answer the same three questions.

Part 9

What people ask about Project 7 gum

Is Project 7 gum discontinued?

Effectively yes, though we found no announcement using that word. The company behind it became Joyride Sweets, a candy business, and gum is absent from its entire current lineup. The original project7.com domain permanently redirects to joyridesweets.com. What you can still buy appears to be stock working its way through retail and wholesale channels, not an actively produced line.

Who owned Project 7, and who owns the business now?

Tyler Merrick founded Project 7 in 2008 and remains founder and CEO of its successor, Joyride Sweets, per the February 2024 PRNewswire release and 2026 conference listings. YouTuber Ryan Trahan joined in early 2024 as Chief Creative Officer, and trade coverage describes him as a co-owner. The continuity of founder, plus the domain redirect, is what ties the two brands together despite Joyride's pages never mentioning Project 7.

Is project7gum.com the official website?

The public record gives no indication of any connection to the original company. WHOIS dates the domain to August 13, 2025, three years after the pivot to Joyride. The site names no company, lists no address, links no about or contact page, discloses Amazon affiliate participation, and routes its buttons to Amazon listings. The address the original company actually maintains, project7.com, redirects to joyridesweets.com.

Where can I still find Project 7 flavors like Birthday Cake?

As of August 2026, listings survive at large retailers including Walmart and H-E-B, at wholesale distributors, and on Amazon, with availability varying by flavor. Treat them as legacy stock: check best-by dates in the listing, prefer sellers with clear return policies, and expect that a years-old gum may not match your memory of it.

Did Project 7 gum help your teeth?

As much as any sugar-free gum does, which is real but modest: chewing stimulates saliva, and choosing xylitol over sugar removes the fuel cavity bacteria feed on. It carried no dental active and made no dental claims. If oral health is your goal, the relevant modern category is dental gum with a published active and dose, alongside, never instead of, fluoride brushing.

Part 10

How we verified this, and what we could not

Everything load-bearing in this article rests on sources you can check yourself. The redirect from project7.com to joyridesweets.com, including its 301 status and its x-redirect-reason header, was captured directly by us on August 29, 2026, and takes under a minute to reproduce. The domain-creation dates for project7.com, joyridesweets.com and project7gum.com come from WHOIS records via standard lookup tools. The 2022 launch of Joyride and Ryan Trahan's Chief Creative Officer title come from the February 15, 2024 PRNewswire release. Joyride's establishment framing and product lineup come from its own live pages as captured the same day. The Project 7 founding story comes from multiple independent profiles published during the gum years, and the rebrand narrative, the co-owner detail, the retail ranking and the Series A come from trade coverage by Nosh and Creator's Blueprint, which we cite as their reporting, not as our own verification.

Just as important is what we could not verify, because leaving it out silently would flatter the story. We could not find a formal discontinuation announcement for the gum, so we do not claim one exists or that none was made. We could not confirm who operates project7gum.com, so we describe only what its pages and records show and draw no conclusion about intent. We found no Trustpilot or Better Business Bureau presence for either the gum-era company or that site, so consumer-review evidence simply does not enter this article. We could not confirm the state of the brand's old social accounts, and the trademark registrations that surface under the name Project 7 belong to an unrelated company in a different industry, so we set trademarks aside entirely. Where this article reads confident, it is because the primary record is unambiguous; where it hedges, the hedge is the finding.

Accuracy note: all statements about Project 7, Joyride Sweets, project7gum.com and retail availability reflect the public record as captured on August 29, 2026. Companies change their pages, listings sell through, and records update. If you represent either company and something above is wrong or outdated, write to us and we will check it and correct it; that offer is standing and it applies to every brand we cover.