One of the major companies that still produces cards with gum is Topps. Topps is widely considered the most prominent brand in the baseball card industry today, holding the exclusive licenses to produce cards for Major League Baseball. Every year, Topps releases sets of new baseball cards at the start of the season. Their main flagship set is called Topps Series 1, which comes out in spring and contains over 300 base cards along with special parallel and insert cards. Topps Series 1 packs still contain a small piece of chewing gum alongside the cards, harkening back to the original Topps design from the 1950s when they helped popularize the integration of gum and cards.
Some other Topps sets that come with gum year after year include their Topps Series 2 set released in midsummer with another 300+ cards, as well as special themed collections such as Topps Chrome, Heritage, Allen & Ginter, and more. While these supplemental releases are not quite as large in scale as Series 1 and 2, they provide additional opportunities for collectors to rip wax packs containing both cards and gum throughout the season. The familiar snap of opening a fresh pack and then peeling back the wrapper to reveal the gum and cards inside has been a enjoyed by generations of baseball enthusiasts.
In addition to Topps, some smaller independent companies have tried to fill a niche by intentionally evoking the aesthetic of the historical gum-and-card combination. One such brand is Leaf, who incorporates little round balls of chewing gum that resemble the Hubba Bubba bubbles of decades past into their sports packages. Another is Donruss, a vintage brand revived in recent years. They pair their retro-styled designs with sticks of banana-flavored Bubblicious gum tucked into the backs of bundles. While these newer retro-inspired lines do not have the scale or market share of Topps, their emphasis on resurrecting the charms of early baseball cards through still including gum has appealed to collectors seeking a more authentic old-school experience.
Meanwhile, the giants of the general sports card industry like Panini and Upper Deck that work with licenses from other professional leagues almost never enclose gum nowadays due to various manufacturing and health concerns. Their baseball sub-brands such as Donruss Elite and Bowman Draft remain quite popular with collectors even without the added bonus of chewing gum as fans simply appreciate the attractiveness of card designs, quality of production, and prospects highlighted in those releases. Even so, devoted fans of vintage gum-and-card culture continue advocating for its preservation within the baseball-specialty scene where it originated and still thrives under Topps’ yearly flagships.
While chewing gum is now an optional extra for most modern sports card production lines across the board rather than an absolute given like in the early days, it remains a treasuredLINK within the sphere of traditional baseball cards. Topps strikes the perfect balance of maintaining theirthrowback gum-card ritual with their marquee MLB properties alongside exploration of new formats, ensuring this venerable combination enjoys ongoing popularity. Smaller niche firms additionally keep the format attainable for collectors seeking as vintage-authentic an experience as possible in today’s market. As such, the pairing of baseball cards and stick of gum retains its status as a commemorated tradition within the pastime, with certain dedicated manufacturers sustaining it for fans both new and old.
