Household Ingredients Compared  ›  Chewing Gum and Mints (Singapore)

Chewing gum and mints: what's actually in them?

Chewing gum and mints share a shelf and a job — fresh breath — but they are built differently. A sugar-free gum is mostly sweeteners (sorbitol, xylitol, mannitol, aspartame, acesulfame K) holding a gum base together. A chewy mint (Mentos roll) is mostly sugar and glucose syrup. A compressed mint (Tic Tac, Fisherman's Friend) is mostly a single sweetener pressed into a pellet. This page keeps the three groups separate, because comparing a sugar-free gum to a sugar mint as if they were the same product is the whole trap. Note also that gum is not swallowed, so its nutrition panel is minimal by design — see the nutrition section.

This page does not give a health score or a "best" pick. It shows the ingredient list as printed and flags sweeteners, sugar and allergens. It does not assess dental claims.

The headline, in 30 seconds

• Sugar-free gum is sweetener-led. Extra Peppermint lists five sweeteners before the gum base; Mentos Pure Fresh lists xylitol at 32% as its first ingredient. "Sugar-free" means no sucrose — it does not mean unsweetened.
• A Mentos roll is a sweet, not a gum. Mentos Mint Chewy Dragees list sugar first, then glucose syrup — the opposite construction to the sugar-free gums on this page.
• Tic Tac Fresh Mint is 94.5 g sugars per 100 g. Each mint is tiny, so the per-mint sugar is trivial, but per 100 g it is almost entirely sugar, maltodextrin and fructose.
• Fisherman's Friend is almost entirely sorbitol. The sugar-free mint lists sorbitol at 98 g per 100 g in one listing (and the Original menthol version at 91 g per 100 g) — a sweetener pellet with menthol and eucalyptus oil, not a sugar mint.
• Almost every list here is a UK, Australian or US listing, not an SG pack transcription. The brands are sold in Singapore, but the SG packs still need photos — each panel is flagged accordingly.

At a glance

Panelled with verbatim lists: 11 products. Seen-but-not-verified: see the list below. No prices are shown: they change weekly and would go stale. This site compares ingredients only.

Sugar-free chewing gum

Chewy mints

Compressed mints and lozenges

Seen but not verified — do not panel until checked

• Wrigley's Doublemint, Spearmint, Winterfresh, Big Red, Juicy Fruit — sugared gums sold in Singapore; no SG verbatim list retrieved. (Secondary summaries describe Doublemint as sugar + dextrose + aspartame + acesulfame K, but no pack list was retrieved.)
• 5 Gum — Peppermint Cobalt and other flavours — sugar-free gum sold in Singapore; no SG verbatim list retrieved.
• Clorets, Happydent, Polo, Smint, Mentos Now Mints — mints sold in Singapore; no SG verbatim list retrieved.
• Mentos Pure Fresh — Cherry, Fruit, Sweet Mint, Chloro — gum flavours with Open Food Facts entries in other markets; no SG verbatim list retrieved.
• Fisherman's Friend — Cherry, Lemon, Original (sugared) — other lozenge flavours; no SG verbatim list retrieved.
• Tic Tac — Orange, Fruit Adventure, Strawberry & Cream, Dr. Pepper — other Tic Tac flavours; the Orange list (sugar, maltodextrin, tartaric acid…) was seen in a secondary summary but no SG pack list was retrieved.
• Extra — Spearmint, Cool Breeze, Strawberry, and other flavours; Eclipse — Polar Ice, Spearmint — gum flavours sold in Singapore; no SG verbatim list retrieved.

Nutrition — what the numbers say

Chewing gum is not swallowed, and Open Food Facts marks nutrition as "not applicable" for the chewing-gum category — most gum packs print no per-100 g nutrition panel at all. Mints are swallowed, so their panels exist but are usually per-mint or per-100 g sugar figures. All figures in the table are as sold, per 100 g where a per-100 g figure was printed. No official Singapore Nutri-Grade (A–D) was found printed on any of these listings in this pass, so none is quoted here; no grade has been assigned.

Salt and sodium: salt = sodium × 2.5. No sodium figure was printed in any source retrieved for this category, so the sodium column reads "not stated" throughout — it is not estimated as zero.

Total vs added sugars: packs list total sugars, not added sugars. A total-sugars figure is never labelled here as "added sugar". The ingredient list remains the evidence for added sugar (sugar, dextrose, fructose, glucose syrup) versus sugar alcohols (sorbitol, xylitol, mannitol, maltitol), which are sweeteners, not sugars.

Open Food Facts is a community database and is flagged as secondary where used: the pack and the retailer nutrition section take precedence if they disagree. Figures marked "not stated" were not in the source retrieved; they are not estimated, borrowed from another variant, or copied across flavours. Click a column header to sort the table; "not stated" always sorts last.

Per-serving figures (quoted exactly as printed, not converted): Extra Spearmint / Extra Peppermint — per 1 piece: 5 calories, 0 g fat, 0 mg sodium, 2 g carbohydrates (0 g sugars, 2 g sugar alcohols), 0 g protein (secondary article summary, not a pack panel). Tic Tac Fresh Mint — per serving of 0.5 g (1 mint): sugars 0.472 g (Open Food Facts). Eclipse Polar Ice — per 2 pieces: under 5 calories, 0 g fat, 0 mg sodium, 2 g carbohydrates (0 g sugars, 2 g sugar alcohols), 0 g protein (secondary article summary). Per-serving rows are kept separate from the per-100 g table above and are never sorted against it.

Observed numbers, no verdict: the only verified per-100 g figure on this page is Tic Tac Fresh Mint at 94.5 g sugars per 100 g. The sugar-free gums and Fisherman's Friend print no sugars figure because their sweetness comes from sugar alcohols and intense sweeteners, not sugars — the ingredient list, not the nutrition table, is the evidence there.

Seen but not verified (nutrition): no per-100 g nutrition panel was verified in this pass for any gum on this page, for Mentos Chewy Dragees Mint, for either Fisherman's Friend variant, or for Tic Tac Citrus Adventure. Their ingredient panels are unchanged; their nutrition figures are not estimated here.

How to read a gum or mint label — the jargon, in plain English

Sugar alcohols (-tol sweeteners: sorbitol, xylitol, mannitol, maltitol)

Sweeteners that taste sweet but are not sugars. They are counted as carbohydrates, not as sugars, on a nutrition panel — which is why a sugar-free gum can list 2 g of carbohydrate and 0 g of sugar per piece.

Aspartame / acesulfame K / sucralose

Intense sweeteners, hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, used in tiny amounts alongside the sugar alcohols. Aspartame carries the warning "contains a source of phenylalanine" for people with phenylketonuria (PKU).

Gum base

The chewable, non-digestible base of chewing gum. Its composition is a trade secret and is never broken down on the label — "gum base" is the whole declaration.

Glazing agent (carnauba wax)

A plant wax coating that gives pellets and gum pellets their shine and stops them sticking together.

Excessive consumption may produce laxative effects

The standard warning on sorbitol-heavy products (Fisherman's Friend is 91–98 g sorbitol per 100 g). Sorbitol in large amounts has a laxative effect.

Chewy dragee vs compressed mint

A chewy dragee (Mentos roll) is a soft, chewy sweet with a sugar shell; a compressed mint (Tic Tac, Fisherman's Friend) is a hard pellet pressed from powder. The ingredient list tells them apart: sugar + glucose syrup + starch vs a single sweetener + anti-caking agent.

What this page is not

• Not a health score, and not a "best" pick. Sugar-free gum, chewy mints and compressed mints are different products, and this page does not rank them.
• Not a dental assessment. Xylitol and sugar-free claims relate to dental health, which this page does not assess — it records ingredients only.
• Not complete. The sugared Wrigley's gums, 5 Gum, Clorets, Happydent and Polo are not yet panelled, for the verification reasons given, not hidden.

Sources and method

Checked 12 November 2026 from: Open Food Facts (Mentos Pure Fresh, Mentos US gum, Extra Refreshers, Tic Tac Fresh Mint); UK retailer listings (Extra Peppermint, Extra Ice, Mentos Chewy Dragees, Fisherman's Friend variants, Tic Tac UK transcription); secondary summaries (Eclipse list, per-piece gum figures — flagged as secondary). Cold Storage publishes no ingredient list on any product page, so its shelf could not be panelled from its site. Full per-fact source list is in the accompanying research notes. Nutrition: figures are standardised to per 100 g where the source gives per-100 figures; per-serving-only figures are labelled as such and are not converted; sugars are total sugars as printed, not added sugars, unless the source states added sugars; salt = sodium × 2.5. Where a full pack list could not be verified, the product is in seen-but-not-verified instead of being panelled.