Black Jack

Black Jack Gum: Background & Overview

Black Jack is an anise-flavored chewing gum made by Gerrit J. Verburg Co. and sold through vintagegums.com. It is, in just about every meaningful sense, the oldest branded chewing gum in America. Thomas Adams created it in 1884 as the first flavored gum ever sold in the United States, and it’s been around in one form or another ever since.

It’s a chewing gum, not a bubble gum. Thin sticks, plain black wrapper, a hit of black licorice the moment you bite down. No bells. No crystals. No liquid center. Just chicle, anise, and 140-plus years of history in your mouth and that’s what you signed up for with this one.

You won’t usually find it at the corner store. Black Jack is a specialty item now, available online and at select candy shops. But for retro candy fans and anyone who wants to taste something genuinely old, it’s one of the most interesting chews out there.

The Black Jack Story

The story of Black Jack starts not with a candy company but with a deposed general, a failed rubber experiment, and a kitchen stovetop in Staten Island. The history on this one is fascinating.

In 1869, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna — the Mexican general famous for winning the Battle of the Alamo and famously losing the Texas Revolution — was living in exile in New Jersey. He was in bad shape politically and needed money. He had brought chicle with him from Mexico, the natural gum harvested from the sapodilla tree that the Maya had been chewing for centuries, and he was hoping to sell it as a rubber substitute to American manufacturers. One of the Americans he pitched was Thomas Adams, a photographer and sometime inventor from Staten Island.

Adams bought Santa Anna’s chicle. He spent months trying to vulcanize it, mix it with sulfur under heat, and turn it into something useful for tires and boots. None of it worked. Chicle, it turns out, is stubbornly unsuited for rubber. (Wikipedia)

But Adams noticed something. Santa Anna chewed the stuff constantly, the way the Mayans always had. Adams had heard about the history of chewing gum, and he knew the ancient precedent. So one evening he boiled a small batch of chicle in his kitchen, shaped it into rough pieces, and sent them to a local Staten Island drugstore to see if anyone would buy them. They sold out!

Adams filed a patent on a gum-making machine in 1871 and went into production. His first commercial product was called “Snapping and Stretching” which was pure unflavored chicle, sold mainly on the novelty of the chew. It did well enough to encourage him. He tried sarsaparilla next. Then, in 1884, he added licorice flavoring and named the result Adams’ Black Jack.

Two things made Black Jack a genuine milestone. It was the first flavored gum ever sold in the United States and it was the first gum sold in uniform sticks, as opposed to the rough pellets and chunks that were standard at the time. (Vintage Gums) Every stick of gum you’ve ever bought, every slim flat pack in a checkout lane, traces its format back to this decision. Adams basically invented the shape of gum as we know it.

Black Jack sold steadily for nearly a century. It became a fixture of early-1900s American street life, advertised on billboards in a Norman Rockwell-ish style, part of the landscape the way Coca-Cola signs were. For kids and adults who grew up in the first half of the 20th century, it was simply part of the world.

Then tastes shifted. By the 1970s, sales had slowed to the point where production stopped entirely. Black Jack quietly disappeared from shelves. It sat dormant for over a decade before the first revival, in 1986, which the New York Times covered as a kind of nostalgic curiosity. That run eventually faded too.

The ownership history of Black Jack reads like a corporate family tree. Adams’ company eventually became the American Chicle Company. Warner-Lambert acquired it in 1962 and renamed it Adams in 1997. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert in 2000. Pfizer sold its candy brands to Cadbury in 2003, creating Cadbury Adams. Cadbury was absorbed into Mondelez International. Finally, in 2019, Gerrit J. Verburg acquired Black Jack, along with fellow vintage gums Beeman’s and Clove, from Mondelez and gave the brand a proper home at vintagegums.com. (Candy Industry)

After 150 years, the oldest brand in American gum is still standing and we are glad. It’s like an ancient breed of dinosaur we don’t want to see go extinct.

Pop Culture Cameos

Black Jack has been around long enough to become part of the cultural furniture. Screenwriters reach for it when they want to signal something — nostalgia, toughness, a certain kind of old-school American character. Here’s the full rap sheet.

Seinfeld: “The Library” (1991)

In Season 3 of Seinfeld, Jerry runs into his high school girlfriend Sherry Becker. He’s been carrying a specific memory of her for years: she was a devoted Black Jack chewer. When they finally reconnect, she informs him she never liked Black Jack and always preferred Dentyne. The whole exchange is a small, perfect joke about how memory lies to us. Black Jack is the prop that makes it land.

Pump Up the Volume (1990)

In this cult teen film, Christian Slater plays Happy Harry Hard-On, a high school kid who runs an illegal pirate radio station from his bedroom. He chews Black Jack throughout. The gum is a character choice: it positions him as out of step with his generation, reaching back to something older and more real. It fits the movie’s whole vibe about authenticity.

Homeland: Season 3, Episode 10 (2013)

This one is weirdly specific in the best way. CIA director Saul Berenson, played by Mandy Patinkin, is revealed to chew Black Jack gum during high-stakes operations. Not just any gum. Black Jack, specifically, for good luck. A spy who trusts a 130-year-old licorice gum as his operational talisman is a great detail. It tells you everything about who Saul is without a word of dialogue.

Northern Exposure: “Three Amigos” (Season 3, Episode 15)

In this episode of the early-90s Alaska dramedy, a character dies and his friend Maurice is given a pack of Black Jack gum to bury with him. As a funeral offering. The show’s writers understood that Black Jack is the kind of thing you’d want to take with you.

Bosch: Season 7, Episode 2

In Amazon’s detective series Bosch, officer Jamie Edgar keeps a pack of Black Jack in his police locker to chew after a rough night. It’s a small, realistic detail. The kind of gum a cop keeps in a locker isn’t Juicy Fruit. Black Jack feels right for that character.

Our Black Jack Review

Before the Bubble Bunch tried Black Jack, at least one of us had the same reaction most people have: “I don’t actually like black licorice, so why would I like this?” That tester gave it a 5 out of 5 on taste. That’s the Black Jack effect.

Four testers tried it. Two gave it 5/5 on taste, two gave it 4/5. Three found the texture just right. One called it too hard. Nobody blew a bubble, which is fine; this is a chewing gum and has zero pretensions about it. The flavor was gone in about three minutes flat, which is the one honest knock.

The “very yummy” reaction from the skeptical tester captures something real about Black Jack. It doesn’t taste like modern candy licorice. It tastes older and more specific, more like a real flavor than a flavor imitation. One tester appreciated how natural it feels, noting the chicle gum base as distinctly different from modern synthetic gum. “Seems more natural than other traditional gums,” they wrote, which is accurate since it is more natural than other traditional gums. It’s made from chicle, the same stuff people have been chewing since the Maya.

The thinness of the stick is either a pro or a con depending on how you look at it. It puts less pressure on your jaw than a modern hunk of bubble gum. But you’re done fast. Flavor out in three minutes, and then you’re left chewing plain chicle, which has a pleasant enough texture but isn’t doing much else.

What lingers is the aftertaste. Your breath comes out licorice-fresh, and your tongue stays a little tingly. It’s distinctive and, honestly, kind of pleasant.

Bottom line: if you like black licorice even a little bit, you’ll probably like this more than you expect. If you hate it, you might still be surprised. And either way, you’re chewing a piece of American history that predates the telephone, the car, and the first-ever World Series.