Pitt grad creates gum that brushes teeth
involved a lot of single-use plastic.
“When I looked for portable options, they were all made of plastic, and I wanted something that wasn’t, so I had to make it myself,” Ms. Siegel said.
She’s hoping to tap into the market for sustainable products, which is expected to grow to $150 billion by 2021, according to a study from The Nielsen Co. in 2018. That same study found 75% of people between 21 and 34 years old said they would change their shopping habits to reduce their impact on the environment.
Ms. Siegel plans to offer a pack of Trek Gum for about $5 but hasn’t decided how many sticks will be in each package.
Comparatively, a pack of Peppermint Cobalt Five Gum from Target costs about $2. A bag of Life Savers Mints from CVS goes for $2.60. And a value pack of three Colgate toothpaste tubes from Walmart costs about $4.
No one should start throwing away their toothbrush just yet, though. Trek Gum is still in the alpha phase, Ms. Siegel said, meaning there isn’t a product ready for use.
Right now, working out of her home kitchen in Bloomfield, Ms. Siegel and her team are still gathering data. Using what she calls a “chewing machine,” they are mimicking the motion of chewing using something similar to a meat tenderizer to control things such as the force of each chomp and how many chews occur in a minute.
In the meantime, Ms. Siegel is teaching herself the basics of food science to master the flavor.
“You can have a gum that works really well, doesn’t taste good — your consumer doesn’t care,” she said. “Flavor is something that we’re really trying to learn about.”
Already, Ms. Siegel has garnered a reputation as the “gum girl” on Pitt’s campus — in large part because she won the 2019 Randall Family Big Idea competition, hosted by Pitt’s Innovation Institute — and has started handing out business cards to interested chefs and Uber drivers.
She plans to release a beta version, or a test run, of the gum in October and already has a list of interested taste testers.