Sam Kushner chews gum for a living. Every day, he and 23 other professional tasters at Cadbury Schweppes’ Gum Centre of Excellence in Whippany, New Jersey, don their white lab coats and sit chewing as they ponder the latest flavours and textures developed by the company’s team of expert gum technicians.

Mr Kushner, handpicked for his acute sense of taste, undertook six months of training to get the job. “It’s great — I love it,” he said. “I just chew gum and eat candy all day long.”

The sight of grown men and women blowing and measuring their gum bubbles may seem surreal, but gum is big business — and it is getting bigger. The global chewing and bubble gum market is now worth around £10 billion, according to Jim Cali, Cadbury Schweppes’s director of global gum.

It is growing at 8 per cent per year — double the rate of the sweets market and significantly higher than chocolate’s 5 per cent. In most countries, sales are surging, driven by gum’s popularity as a preferable alternative to high-calorie snacks and cigarettes, as well as improved gum recipes and packaging.

That is why Cadbury, which entered the gum business after buying Adams, the American confectionery group, for £2.7 billion in 2003, is so keen to expand its chewing gum activities. This month it entered Britain, with the launch of Trident, taking the fight to Wrigley, the market leader.

According to Mike Glass, a gum historian at the Whippany development centre, chewing gum was originally made from chicle, the sap of the Sapodilla tree and was first chewed by Mayan Indians in the second century AD, making it a quintessentially North American product.

It was not until 1871, he said, that Thomas Adams, “the father of modern chewing gum”, obtained the first patent in the United States. His success followed several disappointments. Encouraged to use chicle by General Antonio de Santa Anna, a Mexican exile who boarded with Adams in his Staten Island home, he tried to make tyres, toys and masks, without success, before chewing a piece and liking the taste and the chew. Adams, according to Mr Glass, developed chicken gumbo and chocolate peppermint flavour during its history.

Yet, despite the pleasures, there are also problems, in the face of pressure from local authorities unhappy about the pavement mess that chewing gum causes. Jesse Kiefer, a colleague of Mr Glass, a self-styled “gumologist” and an expert on the “science” of gum, is investigating new types of gum that will not adhere to hard surfaces or clothes — but anyone hoping for a quick fix will be disappointed. “There are still some significant challenges to overcome,” he admits.

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