At a glance

The facts, side by side, stated plainly

Swipe sideways on mobile. Simply Gum rows sourced from simplygum.com (About, FAQ, product and refund-policy pages), USPTO TSDR, the Verisign WHOIS record, amazon.com and trustpilot.com, all captured 1 September 2026. Prices in US dollars as shown on the brand's store that day.

Part 1

What Simply Gum is, and why the story checks out

Most natural-gum origin stories are written by a copywriter after the fact. Simply Gum's is unusual in that the public record agrees with it. The brand's About page tells it in one sentence: "Our founder, Caron, started Simply in 2014 after she discovered that regular chewing gum was made of a synthetic plastic base. She started making batches of gum in her apartment using a tree sap (chicle) base & sold the first Simply Gum products in stores throughout NYC." The founder is Caron Proschan, listed as Founder and CEO, and the About page adds that the company is "proudly female and AANHPI Founded", stated once and left there rather than turned into a slogan.

The paper trail runs earlier than 2014, which is the part that makes the story credible rather than merely charming. The domain simplygum.com was registered on 19 May 2012, per the Verisign WHOIS record we pulled on 1 September 2026, with GoDaddy as registrar. The word mark "SIMPLY" was filed with the USPTO on 21 June 2012 (serial 85657963) and registered on 1 October 2013 as registration 4409554, owner "SIMPLY GUM INC", and the record still shows the status "LIVE/REGISTRATION/Issued and Active". Two years of groundwork before the apartment batches went on sale is exactly what you would expect of a founder who meant it, and it is what the filings show. A second "SIMPLY" registration in the chocolate class (serial 88884551, filed 23 April 2020, registered 5 July 2022 as 6782868, goods "Chocolate; Chocolate bars; Chocolate confections", first use October 2021) tells you the company has since grown past gum, and the same USPTO record gives the legal picture: Simply Gum Inc, doing business as Simply Gum, a Delaware corporation, with a correspondence address at 630 Flushing, Mailbox 16, Brooklyn, New York 11206.

What we could not confirm, we leave out. A New York State registry entry surfaced only as a search snippet and the page itself refused our fetch, so we do not cite the older Manhattan address it appears to carry. We did not query the Delaware Division of Corporations, whose search terms prohibit automated queries; a human can do that by hand. We also found no reputable press coverage of outside funding, an acquisition or an investment round, so on everything we reviewed the company reads as a bootstrapped, founder-led business, and we state that as an inference from absence, not as a fact from a filing.

So the setup is real. A brand that has been on the shelf for more than a decade, with a live trademark, a real founder, a Brooklyn address and distribution that includes Whole Foods Market, is not a Shopify theme with a story attached. What the rest of this review examines is not whether Simply Gum is a legitimate company, it plainly is, but what a buyer actually gets for 18.99 dollars a 6-pack, what the classic line's sugar means for teeth, how precisely the marketing language maps onto the label, and where this gum sits for the growing number of people who chew with their enamel in mind. Gum of Gods is read the same way in our Gum of Gods review.

Part 2

The lineup, the prices, and the cost of one piece

The gum collection on simplygum.com listed fifteen flavours when we captured it on 1 September 2026: Peppermint, Pumpkin Spice, Wintergreen, Cinnamon, Ginger, Spearmint, Fennel, Coffee, Maple, Cleanse, Sugar Free Spearmint, Sugar Free Bubble Gum, Sugar Free Peppermint, and two seasonal entries, Candy Cane and Heart Gum. Every one is sold as a 6-pack for 18.99 dollars, with a single exception: Sugar Free Spearmint is 19.99. That is a wider flavour range than most natural gum brands manage, and the presence of Fennel, Coffee and Maple alongside the mints tells you the company thinks of itself as a confectioner as much as a gum maker, which the chocolate trademark confirms.

The piece count is where the arithmetic needs a footnote. No page on simplygum.com that we found states the raw number of pieces in a pack. The nutrition panel on the product page gives a serving size of 2 pieces and "approximately 8 servings per pack", which implies 16 pieces. The Amazon Variety Pack listing title, on the other hand, reads "6 pack (90 pieces)", which implies 15 per pack, and a Walmart listing title we saw only in search results says "15 Pieces, 6 Pack". So the brand's own panel says about 16 and the retail listings say 15. We report both rather than choosing; the word "approximately" on the panel may be doing the reconciling.

The price per piece follows from whichever count you trust. At 18.99 dollars for a 6-pack, 16 pieces per pack gives 96 pieces and about 19.8 cents each; 15 pieces per pack gives 90 pieces and about 21.1 cents each. Call it 20 to 21 cents a piece, and 21 to 22 cents for Sugar Free Spearmint. The Amazon route was cheaper on the day we checked: the Variety Pack (ASIN B00KGH8S0G) showed 31.33 dollars against a 33.99 list price for 6 packs and 90 pieces, which is roughly 34.8 cents a piece, so the brand's own store, at 18.99 for six packs of one flavour, was the better per-piece deal, with the trade-off that Amazon sells the mix. Prices move; check the day you buy. What does not move is the order of magnitude: this is a premium gum priced at several times what a mass-market pack costs per piece, and the rest of this review is about whether the label earns that premium for you specifically.

Where it is sold, in order of how sure we are. The brand's own store, certainly. Amazon, certainly, with the listing above. Whole Foods Market, certainly: a live Sugar Free Spearmint product page on wholefoodsmarket.com returned normally when we fetched it. Target, probably: a Target SKU (A-91986533) turned up in search results and on collection pages, but the specific product URL we tried returned a 404, so we call that search-confirmed rather than page-checked. Wholesale buyers are pointed, per the brand's wholesale page, to "our full wholesale catalog via Faire or Airgoods".

Part 3

The labels, ingredient by ingredient

We pulled two labels verbatim, one from each line, because they are the two a buyer is most likely to compare. The other thirteen flavours were not individually checked, and we do not assume their panels match these. Here is the Peppermint Gum ingredient list exactly as the product page prints it: "Organic Raw Cane Sugar, Natural Chicle Base (chicle, candelilla wax, citric acid), Natural Peppermint Oil, Organic Vegetable Glycerin, Organic Rice Flour, Tapioca Starch". And the Sugar Free Peppermint Gum list: "Plant-based Xylitol, Natural Chicle Base (chicle tree sap, candelilla wax, citric acid), Peppermint Oil, Organic Vegetable Glycerin, Gum Arabic, Organic Rice Flour". Six named ingredients each, with the base itself a three-part composite. That is a genuinely short label by the standards of the gum aisle, and it is written in words a shopper can read without a chemistry degree, which is the point of the brand.

What each ingredient is doing in the piece

Organic raw cane sugar leads the Peppermint list, which under labelling convention means it is the largest ingredient by weight. It is the sweetener and, in a sugared gum, part of the bulk of the piece. It is also the one ingredient with a dental story attached, which gets its own section below. Plant-based xylitol takes the same lead position on the Sugar Free label: a sugar alcohol that sweetens at roughly the intensity of sugar, and the ingredient on which the Sugar Free line's entire dental sentence rests.

The natural chicle base is the product. Chicle is the milky latex of the sapodilla tree, the material all chewing gum was made of before synthetic polymer bases took over in the middle of the last century, and it is what lets the brand say, in its FAQ, "We don't like chewing on synthetic plastic, so we use a tree sap (chicle) as the base of our gum instead!" The base is declared as three components. Candelilla wax is a plant wax from a Mexican desert shrub, used in gum bases as a softener and texturiser so the chicle stays pliable rather than crumbly. Citric acid is the acidulant found in citrus fruit, here in the base for tartness and as a processing aid. Both are refined inputs rather than raw sap, which matters for one marketing phrase later, but both are ordinary food ingredients with long histories in confectionery.

Natural peppermint oil (the Sugar Free label drops the word "natural" and says "Peppermint Oil") is the flavour, an essential oil pressed from the plant. Organic vegetable glycerin is a humectant and softener; it holds moisture in the piece so it does not dry out on the shelf and stays chewable. Organic rice flour is the dusting agent, the fine powder that keeps pieces from sticking to each other and to the wrapper, and it is the ingredient that gives Simply Gum pieces their matte, unglossy look. Tapioca starch, on the Peppermint label only, does similar work as an anti-caking and texture agent. Gum arabic, on the Sugar Free label only, is the dried sap of the acacia tree, used as a binder and coating agent; it is the natural-gum world's answer to the glazing agents on conventional pellet gum.

And what is not on either label: any dental active. No hydroxyapatite, no fluoride, no calcium phosphate system, no mineral of any kind intended for the tooth surface. That is not a criticism; it is a category description, and it is one the brand itself makes by never claiming otherwise. Simply Gum is a natural chewing gum. Judged as one, both labels are tidy, specific and free of the vague "natural flavors" and "gum base" placeholders that most mainstream packs hide behind. If you want to see how rare that is, our citation audit of hydroxyapatite gum brands found functional gums, with far bigger claims, publishing far less.

Part 4

The sugar question: one gram, read carefully

Here are the numbers, from the brand's own nutrition panel as captured on 1 September 2026. Peppermint, per two-piece serving: 10 calories, 2 g total carbohydrate, 2 g sugars, listed as 3 percent of the daily value. The FAQ puts it in plainer words: "approximately 1 gram of sugar in each piece", which is consistent with the panel. Sugar Free Peppermint, per two-piece serving: 4 calories, 0 g sugar, with the sweetness coming from 2 g of sugar alcohol, which is the xylitol. So the two lines are not variants of one recipe with the sugar swapped; they are two different products, one of which is a sugared confection and one of which is not.

What one gram of sugar means for teeth deserves a plain, sourced answer, not a scare. The relevant literature is not in dispute. A 2016 review in Advances in Nutrition by Moynihan (PMID 26773022), written to inform the threshold for recommended sugar intake, states: "Dietary free sugars are the most important risk factor for dental caries." Sugar in a chewing gum is dietary free sugar, and it is delivered in the one way that matters most to teeth, dissolved in saliva and held against the enamel for the length of the chew, where the bacteria in plaque ferment it into acid. One gram is a small amount; a can of soft drink carries several dozen times that. But the mechanism does not care that the amount is small, it cares that the exposure is repeated, and a gum is by definition something people chew repeatedly through the day. Someone who chews five pieces of the classic line a day is putting five separate sugar exposures on their teeth that a sugar-free gum would not.

This is not a criticism unique to Simply Gum. It applies to every sugared confection ever sold, and the brand does something most sugared-gum makers do not: it sells the alternative on the same page. The Sugar Free line is positioned, per the product page, with the cavity rationale spelled out rather than left implicit, and a reader who arrives at Simply Gum with teeth in mind has a clear path. The fair summary is that the classic line is an honest sugared treat, the Sugar Free line is the one to chew habitually, and the brand's own site gives you the information to tell them apart. Where the reasoning about sugar, saliva and the sugar-free baseline is laid out for the whole gum shelf, our guide to the best whitening gum in 2026 walks through what a sugar-free gum does on its own and where actives begin.

Part 5

The claims audit: each sentence, held to the label

We collected every marketing claim we could find on the homepage, FAQ and the two product pages, and asked of each one the same two questions: what on the site backs it, and does the label agree with it. None of the answers are damaging. Several are worth a buyer's attention.

"Chew plants not plastic" / "made from tree sap. never plastic" / "Most gum is made from synthetic plastic, ours is made from tree sap". The label supports the core of this: the base is declared as chicle, a tree latex, and no synthetic polymer appears on either ingredient list. The brand asserts it directly, without a third-party lab test, a certifier or a citation linked on any page we checked, and for a plainly labelled ingredient that is a reasonable thing to do. The claim that most mainstream gum uses a synthetic base is, as a description of the gum aisle, accurate. This is the strongest claim on the site and the one the product most fully earns.

"Just chicle, nothing synthetic". Here the marketing rounds the label up slightly. The base is declared as chicle, candelilla wax and citric acid, and the rest of the piece includes glycerin, rice flour and starch or gum arabic. Candelilla wax is a plant wax and citric acid is a food acid, both are refined and processed inputs rather than sap straight from the tree, and "just chicle" does not describe a six-ingredient label. We flag this as a simplification, not a falsehood: every named ingredient is plant-derived or plant-sourced, so "nothing synthetic" survives if you read "synthetic" to mean petroleum-derived, which is clearly the intended reading. A buyer who takes the tagline literally will be mildly surprised by the panel; a buyer who reads the panel will find nothing to object to.

"5 or less ingredients each". This appears in the context of the brand's mints, not its gum, and we did not audit the mint labels. Applied to the two gum labels above, the count is six named ingredients plus a three-part base, so the phrase should not be carried over to the gum in a buyer's head. As far as we can tell the site does not carry it over either; we note it only because the number travels easily.

"Sweetened with xylitol to fight cavities and protect enamel while you chew" and "helps protect against cavity-causing bacteria while supporting a cleaner, healthier mouth". These are on the Sugar Free Peppermint product page, and they are the only functional dental sentences on the site. They are also, correctly, confined to the Sugar Free line; the sugared flavours make no dental claim, which is the right call. The sentence rests on xylitol as the sweetener, and the site cites no study for it and publishes no xylitol amount per piece beyond the 2 g of sugar alcohol per two-piece serving on the panel, which in a single-polyol formula is a usable proxy of about 1 g per piece. We would call this claim ordinary for the xylitol category rather than remarkable: a general statement about the sweetener, with no product-specific evidence behind it, and no dental active of any kind in the formula. It is a sugar-free gum with a sugar-free gum's virtues, described in slightly more confident language than the label provides for.

Packaging: "Our packaging is made of uncoated paper so it can be recycled with other paper products". We went in expecting a biodegradable or compostable claim, because that is what natural-gum brands tend to make, and Simply Gum does not make one. The word on the FAQ is "recycled", the material is uncoated paper, and that is the whole claim. No compostable or biodegradable certification (BPI, TUV or otherwise) is named anywhere we looked, and none needs to be, because none is claimed. This is the precise version of the packaging story, and we would rather a brand made it than the loose one. The distinction matters because the three words are routinely blurred in this category: recyclable means the material can enter a paper stream, compostable means it breaks down under defined conditions on a defined timescale, and biodegradable, without a standard attached, means very little. Simply Gum has chosen the one it can support.

Certifications. The site displays Gluten Free, Kosher, Vegan and Non-GMO marks as icons. We found no linked certificate documents behind them, which is typical for consumer food sites and not a point against the brand; we mention it because a reader with a strict dietary or religious requirement may want to ask the company which body issued which mark, and the contact route for that is below.

The refund policy, verbatim, because this is where marketing promises usually part company with the fine print, and here they do not: "If you are dissatisfied with a Simply product you purchased from our website, please reach out to us at info@simplygum.com within 30 days of purchase date, and we will do our best to make things right. While we can't accept a return of any consumable product, we will offer a replacement or issue a refund to you if you qualify." That is a 30-day window, a named human email address, a plain statement that consumables cannot be returned, and a refund or replacement "if you qualify", which is a hedge, but an honest one. We found no separate "money-back guarantee" language anywhere on the site that this policy would contradict. Note that it applies to purchases from the brand's own store; Amazon and Whole Foods purchases fall under those retailers' policies.

Lab documents. The wholesale page describes the company as making "clean-label mints, gum, and candy made with simple ingredients and elevated packaging" and points trade buyers to Faire or Airgoods; it makes no mention of a certificate of analysis, a safety data sheet, lab testing or spec sheets, and we found none elsewhere. On this blog we usually treat that as a gap, and for a functional gum it is one. For Simply Gum it is not applicable: the brand makes no active-ingredient claim that a certificate would need to substantiate. The honest comparison point between Simply Gum and a functional gum is therefore not ingredient potency, where there is nothing to compare, but disclosure practice, and on the disclosure that its category calls for, a full ingredient list in plain words, Simply Gum delivers.

Part 6

What buyers say, and how much weight it carries

The one large public sample is on Amazon. The Variety Pack listing (ASIN B00KGH8S0G) showed a 3.9 out of 5 average from 5,918 ratings when we captured it on 1 September 2026. That is a big enough sample to mean something, and 3.9 is a respectable score for a natural gum, a category where the softer, shorter-lived chew of a chicle base tends to cost brands a star among buyers who grew up on synthetic pellets. We did not read and tabulate the individual reviews for this article, so we do not characterise the complaints; we give you the number and its source and let you open the listing yourself. A Variety Pack rating also blends six flavours, so a strong dislike of one can pull down the average for the others.

The other review venues are, for a brand of this age, strikingly quiet. The Trustpilot page for simplygum.com carried a single review at capture, which is too small a sample to say anything about, and we say nothing about it. The Better Business Bureau returned "No results for 'Simply Gum'" when we searched, meaning no listing rather than a bad one. We also tried to find Reddit discussions of the brand and could not access the platform from our research tools this session, so this review contains no Reddit material; if you want the unfiltered chewer's-eye view, that is the place to look, and we would rather leave the gap visible than fill it with something we did not read.

What a chicle base feels like, and why that is not a defect

A note that applies to every chicle gum, this one included. Chicle is a natural tree latex, and it does not behave like an engineered polymer: it chews softer, it firms up and softens with the temperature of your mouth, it holds flavour differently and usually for less time, and it looks matte rather than glossy because it is dusted with flour rather than coated with a glaze. Buyers who arrive expecting the long, springy chew of a conventional pellet often rate natural gum a star lower for reasons that have nothing to do with quality and everything to do with material. If you have never chewed chicle, buy one pack before you buy six, and judge it as what it is.

Part 7

What Simply Gum genuinely does well, on the record

A review that only counted gaps would be unfair to a brand whose main achievement is having few of them. So, in the order a careful buyer would weigh them.

Ingredient minimalism, and the transparency to go with it. Full ingredient lists are printed verbatim on every product page we opened, the gum labels run to six named ingredients, and the mints are held to a stated "5 or less" standard. Compared with the "gum base, natural and artificial flavors, BHT" boilerplate on a mainstream pack, this is a different level of candour, and it is the thing the whole brand is built to deliver.

A chicle base as a real point of difference. Most mass-market gum is built on a synthetic polymer base; Simply Gum is built on tree latex. That is not a slogan, it is a declared ingredient, and it is the accurate, verifiable distinction the marketing rests on. A spat-out piece of chicle is organic matter rather than a polymer wad, which is the environmental argument in one sentence, and one the brand, to its credit, makes without dressing it up in a certification it does not hold.

Organic and named inputs, not badges. "Organic Raw Cane Sugar", "Organic Vegetable Glycerin", "Organic Rice Flour" are called out by name on the panel. An "organic" badge with no specifics is common in this aisle; a panel that tells you which ingredients are organic and which are not is less common, and more useful.

A sugar-free option with its purpose stated. Rather than leaving the sugar in the classic line unmentioned, the brand sells a xylitol line and says on the product page why it exists. A sugared-confection maker that volunteers a sugar-free alternative on the same shelf, with the cavity rationale in print, is doing the reader a service, whatever one thinks of the strength of the xylitol sentence itself.

A founder story that survives the public record. "Started in her apartment in 2014" is corroborated by a 2012 domain registration and 2012 to 2013 trademark filings; the timeline holds up under primary-source checking rather than dissolving into vagueness. A brand that has been doing the same thing for over a decade, with the same founder, has earned the benefit of the doubt on the things this review could not check.

A refund policy a human can use. Thirty days, a named contact address, plain words about what can and cannot be returned, and no oversold guarantee elsewhere on the site that the policy then quietly walks back. That is rarer than it should be.

Identity stated once, not leveraged. "Proudly female and AANHPI Founded" appears on the About page and is not turned into a sales device on every other page. It reads as a fact the founder wanted on the record, which is how it should read.

Part 8

Who should buy Simply Gum, who should not, and where a functional gum fits

Good fit: the buyer whose reason is the label. If what bothers you about gum is the synthetic base, the vague "flavors", the coatings and the plastic-lined wrapper, Simply Gum is one of the most credible ways to act on that in an American supermarket: a declared chicle base, six named ingredients, organic inputs specified, uncoated paper packs, sold at a price that does not punish the principle. Take the chew for what chicle is, softer and shorter-lived than the polymer gum you grew up with, and treat that as the cost of the choice. Buyers in this group are optimising for exactly the things Simply Gum does best, and nothing in this review argues with them.

Good fit, with one adjustment: the habitual chewer who cares about teeth. Buy the Sugar Free line. The classic line is a well-made sugared treat and there is nothing wrong with a sugared treat, but a treat chewed five times a day is a sugar exposure five times a day, and the literature on dietary free sugars and caries is as settled as dental literature gets. The Sugar Free Peppermint, Spearmint and Bubble Gum flavours give you the same base, the same short label and the same packaging with xylitol in place of the cane sugar. That is the version to keep in your bag.

Read the panel first: the buyer who assumed "natural" meant "good for teeth". It does not, and the brand does not say it does. A natural base, organic sugar and a paper wrapper are three real virtues, none of which acts on enamel. The sugared line is, dentally, a sugared gum; the Sugar Free line is, dentally, a sugar-free gum, which is a good thing to chew after meals because chewing raises saliva flow, and not more than that. Anyone who bought Simply Gum as a dental step has bought a clean-label gum that delivers the sugar-free baseline at best, at a premium justified by the label, not by the teeth.

Step across the aisle if you are chewing for your enamel. Anyone chewing specifically for enamel support is shopping in a category Simply Gum does not enter and does not claim to: gums built around a mineral active, with the dose as the whole point. The standard this review applied to Simply Gum applies there with more force, not less, because mineral-category prices deserve mineral-category proof: what active, what particle size, how many milligrams per piece, and where the certificate is published. Our round-up of remineralizing chewing gum, tested and compared holds every candidate in that category, ours included, to exactly those questions. For the record, and in the same terms we ask of everyone: Minvelle uses nano-hydroxyapatite as its active, 200 nm rods at 5.7 mg per piece, with the dose, the certificate of analysis and the safety data sheet published on its transparency page, sweetened with xylitol and erythritol, 18 pieces per box, chewed one piece a day after your most acidic meal or drink, as a complement to brushing and never a replacement for it. That is a different purchase from a Simply Gum purchase, made for a different reason, and a buyer should know which one they are making.

The verdict in one line. Simply Gum is a well-made, plainly labelled natural chewing gum whose marketing stays unusually close to its label; buy the Sugar Free line if you chew often, buy either line for what is not in it, and buy from a different category if your reason for chewing is your enamel.

Questions, answered

The things people actually ask