Babol Green Apple

Big Babol Green Apple: Background & Overview

Big Babol Green Apple is a bubble gum made by Perfetti Van Melle, the Italian-Dutch candy giant behind Mentos, Chupa Chups, Airheads, and about a dozen other brands you’ve definitely eaten. It’s a soft, chewy bubble gum in a bright green apple flavor, sold in small foil-wrapped pieces, primarily across Europe and the Middle East. The Bubble Bunch picked ours up in Ireland.

The “Big Babol” brand itself dates back to 1978 Italy. The green apple flavor is a newer addition to the lineup, launched in the UK convenience channel in 2023. If you’re in the US, you’ll need to import it or order online. For anyone in Europe, it’s a solid pick off the shelf.

The Big Babol Story

Here’s the thing about the name: Big Babol is not some made-up nonsense syllable. It’s a deliberate (and slightly mangled) play on “Big Bubble.” The brand was designed from the start around the goal to blow large bubbles, so how did it do?…read on.

Perfetti launched Big Babol in Italy in 1978. The company had been around since 1932, when brothers Ambrogio and Egidio Perfetti started it in Lainate, outside Milan. By the late ’70s, Perfetti had built up real expertise in gum, and Big Babol was their swing at something specific: a soft, pliable bubble gum engineered for maximum bubble size, not just flavor. The pieces came individually wrapped and were notably larger than the competition. When sales boomed almost immediately, Perfetti packaged five pieces together to meet demand. (Perfetti Van Melle)

The brand grew across Europe and then spread further. India, Turkey, Russia, China, Indonesia, Vietnam — Big Babol found audiences in a lot of places that don’t typically have much overlap in candy culture. In India especially, it became something close to iconic. Big Babol launched there in 1997 and cracked the market with a clever packaging move: selling in plastic jars that retailers could put right at the front of the counter. In a fragmented distribution market, visible placement made all the difference.

In 2001, Perfetti merged with Dutch company Van Melle to form Perfetti Van Melle. That merger put Big Babol in the same corporate family as Chupa Chups, the Spanish lollipop brand. And if you know anything about Chupa Chups, you know the one wild fact: their logo was designed by Salvador Dalí. In 1969, Chupa Chups founder Enric Bernat met Dalí for coffee and mentioned he needed a new logo. Dalí sketched the daisy design in about an hour, on a newspaper, and suggested putting it on top of the candy instead of the side. The logo has barely changed since. That’s the company that makes this bubble gum!

Big Babol kept evolving. There was a liquid-filled edition, a cotton candy version called Filly Folly that turns to gum in your mouth, and various special editions over the years. In India, the brand also stuffed collectibles into its packaging like temporary tattoos and WWE tazo cards which, predictably, made kids go absolutely nuts for it. The green apple flavor joined the range more recently, part of a push to expand the lineup beyond the original strawberry and classic fruit varieties.

Weird Ads

Big Babol’s Indian advertising campaign deserves its own section, because it was genuinely strange in the best possible way.

The tagline was “Bade kaam ki cheez,” which translates roughly to “pretty damn useful.” The ads took that literally. They didn’t just show kids having fun blowing bubbles, they showed bubbles as a superpower. A turtle, adopted by a bird and desperate to fly like its siblings, blows a giant pink bubble and floats into the sky. A little boy being dive-bombed by a crow blows a bubble, rises into the air, and squirts toothpaste on the crow from above. The crow had it coming.

These weren’t slick, aspirational ads. They were weird, specific, and genuinely funny, and they worked! The campaign ran for years and Big Babol became a generational touchstone for Indian kids who grew up in the late ’90s and 2000s. (The Print)

Here’s one of the classic Big Babol spots:

Our Big Babol Green Apple Review

Three Bubble Bunch testers tried Big Babol Green Apple, and the word that comes up most is “solid.” Not explosive, not life-changingm but solid. The flavor is good, the apple is recognizable and not too artificial, and the gum delivers decent bubbles. What it doesn’t do is stick around.

Two testers gave it 4/5 on taste, one gave it 3/5. Bubbles ranged from tennis-ball to softball sized. “This is a solid bubble gum for chewing and blowing bubbles,” wrote one tester, which is exactly what the brand has been promising since 1978. Another called it “enjoyable” but flagged the fade: “Flavor disappeared after only a short time!” The third had the opposite problem with the bubbles: good flavor, but underwhelmed by how big they got…after all, it is named “Big Bubble.”

Texture was a split verdict. Two testers called it too hard, one called it too soft. Nobody hit “just right,” which is unusual. The gum might behave differently depending on temperature or how long it’s been sitting, but the takeaway is that the texture is inconsistent in a way that the best bubble gums aren’t.

The flavor duration is the main limitation. You get a nice green apple hit up front, and then it’s mostly gone before you’ve really settled into it.

That said, for a gum picked up in Ireland that most American readers have never tried, it punches above its weight. If you see it in a European shop, it’s worth grabbing.