Mars Wrigley is moving away from promoting its chewing gum products as only breath deodorizers, but more as stress-relieving tools for young adults and teenagers.
For over a century, gum has been synonymous with freshening breath, the company said Wednesday in an email to USA TODAY. Mars Wrigley decided to deviate from this correlation when it conducted "the biggest consumer engagement operations" in its history, the company said.
"We found that people, particularly (25 and under), were intuitively integrating our chewing gum into their wider toolkit of well-being solutions," the company's email said. "And that they were chewing gum to support their emotional needs."
Mars Wrigley's deviation also comes as mental health and peoples' well-being are becoming more emphasized in today's society, leading to various demographics looking for "affordable tools to address the micro-stresses of everyday life," according to the email.
Extra and Orbit are the chewing gums Mars Wrigley is moving into "the consumer space of holistic wellbeing," the company said.
Mars Wrigley launched a global ad campaign in January promoting its top-selling Orbit, Extra, Freedent and Yida brands as tools for mental well-being, the Associated Press reported.
Alyona Fedorchenko, vice president for global gum and mints in Mars’ snacking division, told the outlet the idea to shift came in 2020 when the "company was frantically researching ways to revive sales."
Fedorchenko told AP things became clear when she spoke to a nurse in a hospital's COVID-19 ward, who told her chewing gum calmed her down even though she always kept on her mask.
The nurse confirmed studies done by Mars that showed half of gum chewers use the product to relieve stress or boost concentration, the AP reported.
“That, for us, was the big ‘Aha!’” Fedorchenko told the outlet. “We’ve had a century of legacy of fresh breath, and that is still very important. Don’t get me wrong. But there is so much more this category can be.”
Andrew P. Smith, an occupational and health psychology professor at Cardiff University in Wales, said the relationship between chewing gum and stress reduction has been researched extensively, according to an article published by the National Library of Medicine.
"In a laboratory study, chewing gum was associated with reduced self-reported stress and anxiety following performance of a stressful multi-tasking framework that requires participants to work on multiple tasks at the same time," Smith said.
Smith did acknowledge that other research has been done resulting in chewing gum leading to increased stress, according to the article.
"Experimental research looking at short-term induced stress has shown contradictory findings on self-reported stress and anxiety," Smith said. "The observed effects sizes on self-reported stress and anxiety have been small or moderate. The differences in results may be due to different methods of stress induction being employed in different studies."
Smith also mentioned an experiment that saw employees of a university being required to chew gum every day for two weeks, and when they felt stressed, according to the article. The study resulted in "lower anxiety and depression, improved mood and lower occupational stress," the professor said.
"Chewing gum has been found to reduce self-reported, naturally occurring stress when chewed over a relatively long period of time," Smith said. "Research on the effects of chewing gum on heart rate and levels of cortisol could give a clearer view of whether such effects are visible at a physiological level."
Jonathan Limehouse covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]