Wrigley Company History

Since 1892 the Wrigley Company has had a long tradition of satisfying its customer’s tastes and supporting those in need. Mr. William Wrigley Jr. was 29 years old when he came to Chicago with a drive to succeed. (About Wrigley). As Ernie Banks said “I learned from Mr. Wrigley, early in my career, that loyalty wins and it creates friendships. I saw it work for him in his business” (Banks, Ernie). Mr. Wrigley started out selling soap to local stores, he sold the soap with free packages baking powder because as he said himself “Everybody likes something extra, for nothing” (Wrigley, William). However, he soon realized that the baking powder was more popular than the soap and began in the baking powder business giving sticks of gum away. Once again though, he discovered that the freebie was more popular. In 1892 he began producing and selling his own gum, starting out with his original flavor Juicy Fruit and then a few months later Spearmint, both of which are still around today (Heritage Timeline).

With this development Wrigley opened up a factory in Toronto and began selling outside of The United States. In 1912 one of the Wrigley chocolate manufacturers came up with idea of Life Savers, a ‘summer candy’ and thus began the era of Wrigley’s Gum and Candy Company(Heritage Timeline). Wrigley not only innovated new candy, they also bought the Cubs, a baseball team. As Carrie Muskat, an MLB writer says In 1919 ”Wrigley purchased enough shares to have complete control of the Cubs. He re-named Weeghman Park to…Wrigley Field” (Muskat, Carrie). Wrigley also came up with new ways to advertise with the first-ever national direct-marketing campaign. The Wrigley Company sent free samples to every household in the Phone book in America. After this there was a huge increase in gum sales as people began to buy primarily Wrigley gum (Heritage