At a trailhead north of town, Nate Mal is chewing gum. He mashes a slow rhythm, his jawline bouncing, boots shifting on mud below.
It’s noon in Alaska, a drizzly November day. Mal has set aside a few hours for hiking and foraging in the trees. His mission is spruce resin, a tacky trickle on bark chipped by hand and commanding up to $250 a pound.
Mal takes the sap and melts it down. He adds chicle, sap, and powdered clay. In a warehouse 3 years ago, Mal mixed and boiled, experimented, sifted, and strained. A chef by training, he had somehow become obsessed with creating the world’s perfect gum.
I came to Alaska to follow Mal into the woods. His story and his quest — to reinvent chewing gum based on natural ingredients and old-world oral health — has attracted legions to purchase his products online. With viral videos and unexpected TikTok fame, Mal’s startup brand, Underbrush, rocketed this year to $30 million in sales.
It was a story too strange to pass by. And so as the November days grew short, I got on a plane to Juneau to join Mal and his crew for their final forage of the year.
“Take this chisel,” he said, offering a stout tool and a metal pail. “The trees are down this trail.”
‘Spruce Gum’: A Blast From the Past
Mal and his team have been here before. The forests on Douglas Island, just west of Juneau’s city grid, offer the right conditions and the right kind of trees for foraging one of the main ingredients in his gum.
Underbrush, which is the product brand under Mal’s namesake company, Nathan & Sons, is hardly the first chewable made with resin and sap. Indigenous people picked gooey hunks off tree bark to keep their mouths fresh and teeth clean. Sap’s antiseptic qualities were a long-known hack for oral health.
It was later sold commercially. In 1848, inventor John Bacon Curtis produced what was called The State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum. He cooked a spruce-based brew on a stove to make a sticky substrate that was marketed as a curiosity and a treat.
In the dripping Alaska woods, I popped a piece of Underbrush in my mouth. Its waxy texture comes from resin and a list of ingredients Mal forages or finds from suppliers around the world.
For me, the tart taste has a nostalgic effect and a childhood association with hiking with my dad. As a Minnesota kid, the crust off any pine tree was “spruce gum” that my dad would offer. We kids chewed it and winced, a tacky grit between our teeth plodding down the trail.
A New Kind of Chewing Gum?
Underbrush gum is sold in a slide-open box and is cut into cubes. It comes in cinnamon, honey, berry, and mint. Each piece has a strong initial hit of flavor that fades to a mild sap taste as you chew.
Like a modern-day John Bacon Curtis, Mal found a market intrigued by a spruce-inspired product line. The gum is pricey, about $12 a pack, but people were buying it so fast that Mal now leases two warehouses in his hometown.
Underbrush is sugar-free, and the company touts a natural composition that promotes good teeth. The company had built a following being adversarial to “Big Gum,” which has dropped natural ingredients to adopt synthetic bases and “food-grade plastics” common from Bubblicious to Big League Chew.
Last spring, The New York Times published “Is Chewing Gum Bad for Your Health?” The article describes how polyethylene and other petro-derived constituents can stand in for chicle and spruce.
In the U.K., the “Ban Plastic Chewing Gum Campaign” petition has garnered nearly 30,000 signatures. It cites billions of pieces chewed each year in the country and a litany of purported health and environmental consequences as a result.
John Bacon Curtis might be rolling in his grave. But for Underbrush, a movement away from “Big Gum” and toward natural options was ushering in an unexpected trajectory of success.
Foraging Since He Was Young
The quest for a better chewing gum was never in Mal’s life plan. He grew up in Guam, the son of a Chamorro mom and a U.S. Navy dad. They lived a simple existence and struggled with money, including a stint where a raw shipping container served as the family home.
He explored and immersed himself in the outdoors from an early age. The jungle on Guam was Mal’s playground, and with a dog as his lone partner, he bushwhacked and got lost in the tropical brush. He collected bugs and caught snakes, foraging in nature from the start.
The family moved to California seeking opportunity and a better life. A job at a restaurant steered him into a career based around food. In Alaska, Mal leaned into his chef skills and made the crew dinner one night. A “forest-to-table” theme meant local ingredients and found items from the woods. There was a bowl of spruce resin to try raw. Berries picked on our hike were a garnish on another dish.
As a chef and later the owner of his own place, he worked long hours and was stressed out. He chewed gum like anyone for flavor, fresh breath, and to fight fidgeting.
At an airport one day, bored, he randomly flipped over a pack of Juicy Fruit and scanned the ingredient list. It read: sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, phenylalanine, glycerol, and aspartame.
Although not a vegan, Mal was at the time the head chef at a high-end vegan restaurant focused on natural food. At the airport, he thought, “Why am I chewing on this artificial crap?”
Another moment of destiny would arrive soon after. In 2022, Mal fell victim to a toothache so excruciating that he could barely think. It took a week to see his dentist, and during the days waiting, he started to research natural cures to relieve the pain.
He discovered the tales of resin and indigenous tribes, and spruce harvests in Alaska. He read about natural minerals that could help fortify the surface of a tooth. Mal the chef started messing around. Resin, mastic, chicle, and mint. He added candelilla wax, myrrh, and eggshell dust.
It took hundreds of experiments to get the taste and texture right. Early versions disintegrated or stuck between his teeth. Some were so bitter he spit them out. Eventually, a smooth-chewing formula came to life, and Mal had a product ready to present to the world.
Each Pack Rooted in Adventure
The Gastineau Channel is an icy waterway between Juneau and an archipelago stretching hundreds of miles to the north. It’s a region of fjords and glaciers, cliffs, waterfalls, forests, and whales breaching offshore.
Our hike led north from a trailhead toward the water. It was an hour into the adventure, and the Underbrush group was near a known foraging point.
I followed Mal and Aaron Saari, an employee of Underbrush, both of whom were on the hunt for Sitka spruce. It was “mud season” and verging on winter with snow on distant peaks.
Soon, the scent of saltwater hit the air, and Saari moved to the ocean’s edge. He squinted, motioning toward a seal bobbing in the bay. Near the shoreline are the Sitka trees, and Mal was demonstrating the removal of resin from a trunk.
“Be careful not to damage the bark,” he said, chiseling an amber drip.
Mal’s pail is filling with dust and sticky chunks. Our goal is a pound of foraged bounty, enough to make a thousand pieces of gum.
Just a couple of years ago, Mal would have been out here alone. Now, he runs the Alaska trips to scout for sources, and he employs foragers around the continent to find seeps on trees. The demand is so high that Underbrush has looked at buying acreage and pinelands in Michigan’s U.P.
For now, the tracts on Douglas Island will need to do. Mal has returned here five times in recent months to oversee a stable of freelance foragers and fulfill supply.
I chisel and collect for a few minutes in the quiet woods. It’s 2 p.m., but the sun is dipping already in the November sky. An hour later, we’re hiking on a boardwalk installed over a bog. Rain and sleet are coming as we near the trailhead and get back to the cars.
In 2 days, Mal and crew will head home. Shipments of mastic are arriving from Greece. A case of chicle is waiting in a crate. The spruce is coming from Juneau, and the Underbrush factory is ready to go.
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