My Chewing Gum Stopped Being Shareable. Then I Looked at the Shelf.

I stood in that aisle longer than a grown man should stand holding a packet of gum.

Because here is what bothered me. I have always believed one of the quiet superpowers of chewing gum is that it is shareable. It is social currency. It is how you break the ice with the girl you have been trying to talk to. It is how you do a friend a quiet favour after a heavy plate of fish in g-nut sauce and matooke. Gum was never really about freshening your own breath. It was about the offer. “You want one?”

A single tab kills the offer. You cannot break it in half and pass it across the table. The product had quietly stopped being a thing you share and become a thing you simply consume.

Then I picked up the packs sitting right next to it. P.K. Juicy Fruit. Both still proudly printed with “4 PELLETS, 4.8g.” The sharing format was right there. Orbit had walked away from it while its neighbours held the line.

And here is the twist that made me put down my basket and think. P.K and Juicy Fruit are also Wrigley’s brands. The same company that makes Orbit. So this was never a story of a brand losing to a rival. It was one company deliberately deciding: Orbit becomes the single-serve, premium, on-the-go option, and the job of sharing gets handed to its sister brands.

That changes everything about how I read this.

This is not a mistake. It is a bet. And whether you are selling gum in Kampala or building a brand for a client, it is the same bet you will eventually face: do you optimise your product for the individual, or for the moment between people?

There are good arguments for what Orbit did. A single tab is cheaper to produce, easier to carry, and fits a customer who chews alone on a busy commute. If their data says most people consume gum solo, optimising for that customer is a legitimate, even smart, strategy.

But every strategy has a shadow. When you optimise for the solo user, you quietly give up the sharer. And the sharer is the person who turns your product into a conversation, a gesture, a small act of generosity that someone remembers. The four pellets were never just four pellets. They were four chances to connect, and four chances for your brand to be passed, quite literally, from hand to hand.

Here is the lesson I keep coming back to, and it applies to every brand I work with.

Customers rarely fall in love with your product. They fall in love with what your product lets them do and who it lets them be. Before you redesign a format, a recipe, a price, or a pack, you have to ask the question most brands skip: what emotional job is this thing secretly doing for people, and am I willing to trade it away?

Wrigley’s clearly asked that question. They decided Orbit could let go of sharing because P.K and Juicy Fruit would carry it. That is disciplined portfolio thinking. The danger is for the brand that makes the same cut without a sister brand to catch what falls, and only realises later that it amputated the very thing people loved.

I still bought the Orbit. Old habits. But I did not offer anyone a piece, because I could not.

And a brand that quietly removes your reason to share may also be removing your reason to talk about it.

What is a product you loved that changed something small, and lost you in the process? I would genuinely like to know.