Turns out my billion-dollar idea is too late… For the last 15 months, I’ve been trying to reinvent chewing gum. The idea is pretty simple: take something millions of us already chew every day and see if we can make it using natural ingredients, while actually designing it with oral health in mind. And somewhere along that journey, I discovered mastic. Mastic is a natural tree resin that people have been chewing for thousands of years, and it’s still traditionally harvested on the Greek island of Chios today. So I decided I wanted to see where it actually came from. That meant flying to Athens, getting on an 11-hour ferry to Chios, waking up ridiculously early the next morning and heading out to meet some of the people who still harvest it. And this was probably my favourite part. I come from a farming background, where I’m used to seeing enormous machines doing almost everything. But here, so much of the process is still done by hand. Tiny cuts are carefully made in the trees, the resin slowly comes out and hardens, and eventually you’re left with the little pieces of mastic you see me chewing in the video. Pretty mental to think people were chewing something like this thousands of years before any of the chewing gum we know today existed. Now, mastic on its own isn’t the chewing gum we’ve spent the last 15 months developing. We’ve been experimenting with combining different tree resins and natural ingredients to create something that has the texture, flavour and chew we want from modern gum. But I think there’s something really cool about understanding where the ingredients we use actually come from. I probably didn’t NEED to travel all the way to a tiny Greek island to see some tree resin. But if I’m going to spend years trying to reinvent something that people put in their mouths every day, I want to understand as much of the process as I possibly can — and meet some of the people who make it possible. Anyway… Back to England. We’ve got a chewing gum company to build. 🫡 - @ohgum.lab