A mint is sugar or sweetener, flavour and something to hold it together. It sounds like the easiest vegan question in the shop. It is not, because the "something to hold it together" and the coating on the outside are where animal ingredients turn up.
We looked at every mint and chewing gum label in our database from Mentos, Tic Tac, Wrigley's (Extra, Doublemint, Orbit), Ice Breakers, Trident, Life Savers and Altoids: 111 packs in all. 6 pass our vegan check, 20 fail and 85 stay open.
The ones that fail
Twenty labels name an animal ingredient outright. Gelatin is the most common, on 11 of them.
- Altoids Peppermint, the US tin, is four ingredients: sugar, gum arabic, peppermint oil and gelatin. The Spearmint and Cinnamon tins use gelatin as well.
- Ice Breakers Ice Cubes, the square gum, lists gelatin near the end.
- Trident Vibes Sour Patch Kids gum lists gelatin too.
- Life Savers Gummies, the chewy sweets rather than the mints, are gelatin based.
The other fails are about the shine on the outside. Some Mentos and Tic Tac labels use shellac (E904), a resin made by lac insects, or beeswax (E901) as the glazing agent. The Mentos Mint roll we hold lists beeswax, and a limited edition Tic Tac Minions pack lists shellac. A cherry flavoured Mentos gum and a Tic Tac Cherry Cola get their red from carmine (E120), which is made from insects.
Why most packs stay open
85 of the 111 are neither yes nor no. Three ingredients cause almost all of it:
| Ingredient | On how many labels | Why it is a question |
|---|---|---|
| Glycerol (glycerin, E422) | 43 | made from plant oils or from animal fat; the label rarely says which |
| Gum base | 42 | a blend of polymers, resins and waxes whose recipe is not printed |
| Magnesium stearate (E470b) | 32 | a stearic acid salt that can come from plant or animal fat |
Life Savers Wint-O-Green is a good example. The whole list is sorbitol, magnesium stearate, artificial flavour and aspartame. Three of those are clearly fine. The fourth decides it, and the pack does not say where it came from. The same goes for the regular Tic Tac Fresh Mints: sugar, maltodextrin, rice starch, gum arabic, flavours, magnesium stearate and carnauba wax.
Carnauba wax, by the way, is not the problem. It shows up on 60 of these labels and it comes from the leaves of a palm tree.
The six that pass
The passes are packs whose every ingredient is clearly plant or synthetic: Ice Breakers Mints Spearmint, Ice Breakers Mint Crystals gum, three Mentos products including Mighty Mint gum, and one Orbit pack. Put the Ice Breakers mint next to the Ice Breakers Ice Cubes gum above and you have the whole story of this aisle: same brand, one passes and one fails, and what decides it is the gelatin near the end of the gum's list.
How to check a pack yourself
Read the last third of the list. The first ingredients in a mint are nearly always sugar or a sweetener. The glazing agent, the gelatin and the stearate sit at the end, in the small print. If you see gelatin, shellac, beeswax or carmine, it is not vegan. If you see glycerol, gum base or magnesium stearate and nothing else of concern, only the maker can tell you, and some say on their websites.
Gelatin raises the same question for halal, with the extra problem that the label rarely names the animal. Our count of how few gelatin labels say where it comes from covers that side.