📖 How a logistics consultant ended up making the gum the giants were too scared to make.

For most of my adult life, I worked in logistics software. Spreadsheets, freight routes, customs paperwork. Gum was something I bought at gas stations without thinking. The same brands my parents bought. The same flavors my grandparents bought. Mint, mint, slightly different mint. I had never once asked the question: why has nobody made anything new?

Then in 2023, a project sent me to Guangzhou for two years.

The first week, I walked into a 7-Eleven near my apartment to buy gum. I expected the usual five bricks of mint. Instead, the wall had thirty-something flavors I had never seen. Cookie. Ginger. Eucalyptus. Plum. Some flavor I still cannot pronounce. I bought one of each. I chewed all of them on the walk home.

They were not just different. They were better. The flavor lasted longer. The texture was softer. The ingredients were cleaner. I asked one of my engineers about it the next day, and he laughed at me.

"Henry. The factories that make your American gum are forty minutes from here. Same machines. Same workers. Different bosses telling them what is allowed."

I visited three gum factories in one week. The third one changed my life.

It was family-owned, three generations deep, run by a 68-year-old woman named Mrs. Chen. She walked me through every step herself. Xylitol sourcing. Gum base formulation. Real fruit extracts instead of synthetic compounds. The cleanliness was better than any food facility I had visited in the United States. She made gum for European brands you would recognize the names of.

Then she took me to the back room. The R&D archive. Hundreds of flavor prototypes lined up in unmarked bottles. She handed me one. "Try." It was cookie. Real, buttery, warm cookie, in a piece of sugar-free gum. I had never tasted anything like it in my life.

I asked her why she had never sold it. She shrugged. "European clients say too bold. They say American customer confused."

I went back to my hotel and lay in the dark thinking about cookie gum. About how many people in America are on a diet right now, fighting a cookie craving with a piece of mint, and losing. About how many people doing intermittent fasting would kill for a five-calorie way to quiet their brain at 3 PM. About how there is a factory in Guangzhou with the exact product they need, and not one American brand has been brave enough to put it on a shelf.

Somewhere around 4 AM I made the decision. I had no background in confectionery. No CPG experience. No distribution. No marketing budget. What I had was a factory, a product, and a story so clear it almost felt rude not to tell it.

The first production run took six months to organize. I designed the label myself. I redesigned it fourteen times. I negotiated for ten thousand bottles, which was a tiny order by Mrs. Chen's standards. She gave me payment terms anyway. "You remind me of my son when he was young," she told me. "Stubborn. Wrong about most things. Right about one thing. We will see which kind of stubborn you are."

I figured out FDA labeling requirements alone. I set up an LLC alone. I applied for a U.S. import number alone. I built the website alone. I took every product photo alone, in my apartment, with a desk lamp and a piece of poster board from the stationery store on the corner. I wrote every word of copy on this site. I still write it. You are reading my words right now.

There was no team. There was no investor. There was my savings, my apartment, my laptop, and Mrs. Chen's patience.

Because this is still a small brand. Because I want feedback from real people, not surveys filtered through a customer success platform. Because the day I hire someone else to answer your email is the day Seven Gum starts feeling like every other gum brand on the shelf, and I will not let that happen.

If you email hello@sevengum.com, I read it. I usually reply within twelve hours. I will ask you which flavor you tried and what you actually thought. If you tell me the truth — even the harsh truth — I will be more grateful than any survey form has ever made me.

The giants have boardrooms. They have shareholders. They have quarterly earnings calls and investor decks and forty layers of management between the person who decides what flavor to make and the person who chews it. I have a factory in Guangzhou and an inbox. That is the whole company. That is on purpose.

We are quietly working on flavor number ten. I am not going to tell you what it is yet — the newsletter gets it first. After that, Canada in Q2 2026. Then Mexico. Then the UK. Slow, careful, deliberate growth. No hockey-stick metrics. No "scale at all costs." No outside investors telling me to make a mint-flavored line extension to "broaden appeal."

Just one person, in Guangzhou, trying to make the best gum you have ever chewed. And one factory owner in her late sixties, watching it happen, occasionally laughing at me when I get something wrong.

Thank you for reading this far. Genuinely. If you made it all the way down to this paragraph, send me an email at hello@sevengum.com and just write the word "manifesto" in the subject line. I will mail you a free bottle of Cookie. No catch. No newsletter trick. Just a thank you for caring enough to read a thousand words about gum.

— Henry Liu
Founder, Seven Gum
Guangzhou, China