Illustration by Britt Spencer
Tums tablets. “Tums for the tummy,” as the old ads said. “Tums, de tum tum, Tums,” sung barbershop quartet–style to the tune of the old Dragnet theme song.
Tums have been made in St. Louis for 88 years now, in a five-story redbrick building near the stadium, but the interior is shrouded in pharmaceutical-level secrecy, lest anyone tamper or steal secrets.
Insomniac snacks, car crashes, tax audits, pink slips… Imagine all the gushes of gastric acid those Tums have neutralized. The brand leads the industry, selling more than 60 million bottles or rolls a year—almost double the total of its second-place rival, Rolaids. And 99.9 percent of those Tums, more than 6 billion tablets, are made right here. (The .1 percent? Wrafton Laboratories in England.)
Tums marketers like to praise the product’s old-fashioned simplicity—and one should hope so; the stuff’s made of rocks! Calcium carbonate, better known as limestone or chalk. The secret’s the way Tums are made: the purity, the sweetness, the fine grind, the mouthfeel.
Tums have gotten a little fancy, though: They come in soft-chew smoothies and hard-chew tablets, sugared or sugar-free, myriad flavors. And the barbershop quartet ad’s been replaced by a campaign in which a guy’s in his car eating a soft taco that slaps him in the face.
Misery isn’t new—ancient Sumerians carved a recipe comprising milk, peppermint, and sodium carbonate on their clay tablets—but the calcium carbonate in Tums lasts longer. St. Louis pharmacist Jim Howe, whose wife had indigestion, developed the formula in 1928. When she later doled out the minty homemade meds to seasick passengers on a cruise, they were a hit. Howe then teamed up with his uncle and started the Lewis-Howe Co., setting up a radio contest to name their product. A nurse at Jefferson Barracks won with “Tums.”
(A sweet side note: When Menlo Smith turned his dad’s powdered drink mix into candy that moms deemed too messy, he tried Pixy Stix—and his next-door neighbor, the Tums factory, ran the powder through the presses and created something even better: SweeTARTS.)
In 1978, Revlon bought the Lewis-Howe Co. A subsidiary later sold it to a forerunner of the current owner, GlaxoSmithKline. This summer, there were deep rumblings that GSK might split off its consumer products and focus on pharmaceuticals and vaccines. Coca-Cola and Kellogg were both interested, and in September, Nestlé and PepsiCo were on a list of bidders rumored to possibly acquire a majority stake.
Will Tums stay put? Until that’s certain, sales might just shoot up in St. Louis.
