About us

Hi, we are Claudia and Sandra, the founders of Alpengummi.

We got to know each other during our international master's programme in environmental sciences in Copenhagen.

In the second year - at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna - we had a course on innovations in the forestry sector. We came across the local tree resin as an almost forgotten raw material and the beautiful traditional craft of resin extraction (pitching), which was inscribed on the UNESCO National Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2011.

When we discovered that tree resins have been chewed in many cultures around the world for thousands of years, we asked ourselves what traditional chewing gums are made of today. It was not easy to find out, because the packages of commercial chewing gums only say "gum base" on the packaging, and there is no declaration of what they are actually made of.

What we found out shocked us: Namely, that the gum bases are largely derived from petroleum products, in other words: plastics.

We knew that we needed an alternative!