Cartoonist Hank Ketcham, creator of Dennis the Menace, reputedly once said, “Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it, but don’t swallow it.”

Every year, trillions of sticks of chewing gum are manufactured and, in the next five years, more than 1 million metric tons will be produced. More than 100,000 tons of chewing gum are consumed each year, and the world’s chewing gum industry is worth approximately $19 billion. Considering that annual U.S. chewing gum sales have reached $2 billion, it’s easy to see that people are enjoying chewing gum more than ever.

Some well-known gums had their start in Pittsburgh.

David L. Clark worked for a small candy manufacturer in New York, then started his candy-making business in a small house on Pittsburgh’s North Side in 1886 and sold his candy in the city streets. He eventually sold 150 kinds of candy, including many 5-cent bars. His Clark Bros. Chewing Gum Co., incorporated as a separate business in 1921, made Teaberry and Tendermint gums. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass made the “Teaberry Shuffle” a hit of 1960s gum commercials.

Jon H. Prince, president of McKeesport Candy Co., founded by his grandfather, recalled the friendly relationship between his family and Clark’s. “We were one of the first wholesalers to sell Clark bars and Teaberry gum,” he said. “When Teaberry gum came out, it was truly innovative. People didn’t even know what the flavor was!”

McKeesport Candy and its online arm, candyfavorites.com, still sell more than 100 flavors of gum. Another company, Yum Yum Gum, started in Pittsburgh in 2012, has more than 100 flavors, including coconut, chocolate brownie, cotton candy and glazed donut.

Yum Yum’s owner, Christopher Beers, said the offbeat flavors were created with kids in mind. “Consumers were looking for a sugar-free and aspartame-free gum, and dentists actually give children our gum because we use Xylitol instead of sugar,” Mr. Beers said. “The fitness community absolutely loves our flavors and has no guilt eating chocolate brownie or cotton candy.” The gums are available at Grandpa Joe’s Candy Shop in the Strip District or at yumyumgum.com.

Gum and professional baseball go hand in glove. When the Pirates went to spring training in Bradenton, Fla., last year, two skids of bubble gum made the trip, too, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported at the time.

Clint Hurdle, Pirates manager, repeatedly attracted attention for a voracious gum habit.  “He chews, on average, 20 pieces per game,” Pirates announcer Greg Brown told disc jockeys from 100.7 FM in 2012. During the 2015 PirateFest at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown, a Murrysville boy asked this question:

“Clint Hurdle, what’s your favorite kind of gum?” 

“I’ve tried them all,” Mr. Hurdle replied. “I’ll go off the radar sometimes, but Dubble Bubble is my gum of choice.” (Last summer, Mr. Hurdle disclosed that he had quit gum amid problems with neck pain.) 

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Dubble Bubble was invented 1928 by an accountant at the Fleer Corp. of Philadelphia.

“A lot of people may not know that when inventing bubble gum, Walter Diemer adapted a special formula dating all the way back to the ancient Egyptians,” said Ellen Gordon, president and CEO of Tootsie Roll Industries, which acquired Dubble Bubble in 2004.  “Since then, we have evolved our flavor from sour to sweet, always looking for ways to keep the flavor as long as possible.”

Chewing gum has its roots in various cultures. To clean their teeth and sweeten their breath, Grecian women chewed mastiche, created from resin in the bark of the mastic tree in Greece and Turkey. Mayans chewed sap from the sapodilla tree. The American colonists took a cue from their Indian neighbors, who chewed resin from the bark of spruce trees.

In 1848, John B. Curtis made the first commercial chewing gum from spruce tree resin. He added flavor and paraffin, which provided a rubbery soft texture. He named it the State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum.

Here are some other interesting facts:

• Producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz are credited for coining the term “bubblegum pop” which was a popular teenage genre of music from the late 1960s through the early 1970s. “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies and “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” by the Ohio Express fall into this category.

• Prohibition in the 1920s increased gum sales because people wanted to cover up the alcohol on their breath. 

• There’s even a rare phobia called chiclephobia — the fear of chewing gum.

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Today, Dubble Bubble is “the largest manufacturer of gumballs for candy machines and consumer retail packages,” Ms. Gordon said, noting the product comes in 125 “varieties of colors, sizes, shapes, centers and flavors.” It was at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and “has been a favorite of famous people, athletes and sports teams throughout its history,” she said.

Besides North America, its biggest market, the gum is available in Australia, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

Wrigley’s reach also is broad. 

“With operations in approximately 50 countries and distribution in more than 180 countries, Wrigley produced 300 million packs of gum in its Yorkville, Ill., and Gainesville, Ga., factories in the past three years,” said John Starkey, regional vice president of marketing of Wrigley America.

The company’s story began in 1891, when Philadelphia-born businessman William Wrigley Jr. was selling soap and other necessities in Chicago. He noticed that the sticks of gum he was giving away as incentives were more popular than the items he was selling, so he decided to concentrate on making his own line of gum.

During a recession in 1893, Wrigley introduced Wrigley’s Spearmint and Juicy Fruit. In 1915, he organized the first-ever nationwide direct marketing campaign, shipping sticks of gum to every address listed in U.S. phone books. The company later sent two sticks of gum to children on their second birthday. When Wrigley couldn’t get an ample supply of ingredients due to World War II, domestic sales of the flagship brands stopped and the company sent what it could to the soldiers fighting overseas.

In 1939, the Doublemint twins concept was introduced by Wrigley art director Otis Shepard. This advertising campaign would go on to be one of the most successful campaigns ever for Wrigley.

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Chewing gum gets a bad rap for causing cavities and it can be pretty annoying to sit next to a gum-chewer or bubble-blower. But evidently, gum use isn’t always a social faux-pas.

A study by the South American gum manufacturer Beldent — in America, the brand is Trident — suggested that gum-chewing can make a person more appealing. The experiment at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires, Argentina, featured several sets of identical twins. In each case, one of the twins was chewing gum and the other was not.

Observers were more likely to rate the gum-chewers as friendlier, sexier, more generous and more popular and the other twins as stodgier and meaner. That might help to explain why people the world over are stuck on gum.

Mary Lynn Davidek Alpino (alpino1@verizon.net ) is a freelance writer from Plum.

First Published: February 5, 2017, 5:00 a.m.