Heyhey, it’s #TicTacTuesday! The 94th variety added to the Tic Tac collection at VOCOMOTION Studios: GUM (Freshmint). These come to us from Italy and the home of Tic Tacs manufacturer, Ferrero. It looks like they’re dipping their toes into the “gum pond,” along with Mentos and Altoids.
The first thing I do when I get a new pack, before opening it, is check out the labeling & ingredients list. Sadly, these babies have FIVE kinds of sugar and it’s all sugar alcohols and artificial: xylitol, isomalt, sorbitol, acesulfame K, and sucralose. I really try very hard to avoid artificial sweeteners but when it comes to gum, that’s incredibly difficult. There are some brands out there that are all-natural or just have xylitol, like my favorite Spry gum. The label is pretty, with this neat prismatic pattern that looks like galvanized steel texture.
The flavor on this variety of the gum is exactly the same flavor used in the Freshmint candies. The difference here is when you chew them, they squish instead of crunch. It’s pretty much like eating Chiclets (remember those??). After a bunch of chews, the candy coating on the gum softens and you get a pretty nice textured gum. Like Chiclets, you have to eat a bunch of piece of this stuff to really get one equivalent “piece” of gum. I had 4 Tic Tacs and that was kind of close to a piece of Trident gum in size. So it looks like each pack would contain about 9 sticks of conventional gum since there are 36 gums in each pack (I’m smart with the maths).
I don’t know if these are ever going to come over to the US, but I bet they’d sell pretty well. I would have loved if they skipped the artificial sweeteners and just stuck with Xylitol (very big in European gum & candy) but the flavor and and texture of this gum was really good. Are there other flavors out there? You’ll just have to wait and see…
RATING: 3/5