Mighty Gum: Seattle Based-Small Business
Mighty Gum is not your plain, average gum. Founded in 2018 by Mat Thalakotur, this gum is packed with superfoods, botanicals, and adaptogens, to help our bodies perform at their highest level. While also aiding against the issues we regularly face, such as not getting enough sleep, too much stress, or not working out regularly.
What inspired Mat to create Mighty Gum? It all started with vitamins. Mat would buy vitamins and supplements to support good health, but the habit of taking them wasn’t sticking, and they often just sat on the shelf collecting dust. Mat began to wonder if there was a better, more conducive way, to incorporate vitamins and supplements, into his daily routine. Then it hit him: chewing gum. Chewing gum is a daily habit for Mat, he always has a pack of gum, close by -- on his desk, in his backpack, in the car, ready at a moments notice. That got Mat thinking, maybe there was a way to incorporate vitamins and supplements into gum?
Traditional methods for making gum involve dumping all the ingredients into an industrial mixer, which then vigorously mixes it all together. The mixing creates friction, generating heat, turning the ingredients into a dough like paste, which is then flattened, cooled, cut, and wrapped up for distribution.
The problem with this method is that the heat produced, destroys the quality of the plant based ingredients in Mighty Gum, thus defeating the overall purpose of the gum.
Mat knew his gum needed to be created using a different method that would maintain the quality of the ingredients -- cold compression: in a cold environment, the ingredients are gently mixed together into a blend. Which is then dropped into a small die, and compressed to take the shape of the die. This method maintains the integrity of the ingredients involved.
So Mat set out to find a partner who could make his gum using cold compression. The only problem was that the number of gum manufacturers who used this method was basically zero. After months and months of meetings and phone conversations with manufacturers from all over the world, Mat finally found a manufacturer in Canada who had the special patented cold compression method.
Finally, Mighty Gum was able to move into production, and begin their mission of helping mankind live up to their full potential. Empowering the human body through healthful ingredients.
Mighty Gum doesn’t just empower the human spirit through gum though, they’ve also partnered with Vitamin Angels, an organization that works to help end malnutrition in remote communities around the world. Mighty Gum believes that we all have an obligation to take care of those who have less, and for-profit businesses can make a tremendous impact by sharing the value they create with non-profits.
