Food fraud has long hidden in supply chains, from diluted olive oil to mislabeled seafood. A $30 million gum brand’s battle with more than 800 online counterfeits shows how fast it now reaches consumers directly.
After a spruce-sap gum went viral on TikTok, counterfeit versions flooded online marketplaces. The consumers who bought them had no idea what they were actually chewing. Food fraud costs the global food industry up to $15 billion a year, and it’s no longer hidden in supply chains.
Underbrush
Every pack of chewing gum sold in the United States lists something called “gum base” among its ingredients, a term that can include dozens of synthetic polymers, plastics, and rubbers without disclosing which ones. Most people never flip the package over, but Nate Mal did, and what he found led him to spend two years building Underbrush, a gum made from spruce sap, mastic resin, and chicle, the tree saps that all chewing gum was made from before the industry moved to synthetics. Three TikTok videos showing the process generated $1 million in sales according to the company. Within two years, the company had grown to 60 employees and surpassed $30 million in annual revenue, built almost entirely on ingredient transparency.
Now more than 800 counterfeit versions of Underbrush are for sale online, and the people buying them have no way of knowing what they’re actually putting in their mouths.
After the brand went viral, counterfeit listings began appearing across TikTok Shop, Amazon, Temu, Walmart Marketplace, Facebook, and eBay, many using near-identical packaging, lifted product descriptions, and slight variations of the company’s name. “People still reach out saying, I tried your stuff and it sucks,” Mal says. “It’s not our gum.”
A complaint filed with the Better Business Bureau filled in the details of what customers were actually receiving. One buyer who ordered through a Facebook ad for “Forrest Folk remineralizing gum” received packages labeled “KOZED UNDERBRUSH” and “WEBLINK UNDERBRUSH,” manufactured by companies in Guangdong Province with no connection to the brand. On r/Scams, another buyer described putting the product in their mouth before realizing what had happened: “I’m grossed out I put mystery gum in my mouth.”
Mal shared in an interview that the counterfeits are easy to identify from his side of the supply chain. “No one is harvesting spruce or processing it at the quantities we are,” he says. “So if they list that as an ingredient, I automatically know, okay, just bullshit.” The infrastructure to make the real product doesn’t exist at scale for anyone else, but the infrastructure to fake the packaging does.
The FDA uses the term “economically motivated adulteration” to describe food fraud — when someone intentionally substitutes, removes, or misrepresents a food product for economic gain. The agency estimates it costs the global food industry $10 to $15 billion a year, with examples ranging from diluted olive oil to mislabeled seafood. Those cases historically hid deep in supply chains and surfaced only after testing or regulatory intervention. What’s different now is the speed: according to a 2025 OECD and EUIPO report, global trade in counterfeit goods reached an estimated $467 billion, with counterfeiters increasingly using e-commerce platforms and small-parcel shipping to move faster than enforcement can follow.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that consumers are retreating toward smaller, more familiar circles of trust, placing confidence in neighbors, coworkers, and the brands they already use while trust in institutions continues to erode across developed economies. In that environment, a brand built on ingredient transparency and a direct relationship with its customers occupies a specific kind of value, and counterfeiting doesn’t just copy the product, it undermines the one form of trust consumers are still willing to extend.
“People will say, I got scammed already, so I don’t want to take the risk,” Mal says. Underbrush was built on the idea that consumers deserve to know what they’re chewing, and the counterfeits have made even that simple confidence harder to come by.
A knockoff handbag reveals itself in the stitching, but food fraud, or a counterfeit piece of gum doesn’t reveal anything until it’s already in someone’s mouth.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniegravalese/2026/04/28/a-viral-gum-brands-counterfeit-problem-shows-what-food-fraud-looks-like-now/
