A pharmacist’s formula, a mason jar and a radio contest.

Tums began in a pharmacist’s home in St. Louis, Missouri. English Wikipedia says that in 1928 James Harvey “Jim” Howe, a St. Louis pharmacist, developed the tablets in the basement of his house for his wife’s indigestion. Ad Age, telling the story in a special report published on 29 March 2010, adds that the couple kept the tablets in an old mason jar, and that several months later, on a cruise, Howe’s wife shared them with fellow passengers. St. Louis Magazine, in its “St. Louis Sage” column of 15 November 2018, describes the same episode and calls the early tablets “minty homemade” ones.

The cruise story has stayed part of the brand’s telling: a marketing director at GlaxoSmithKline told Ad Age in 2010 that the message had always been about simplicity, “going all the way back to the cruise-ship anecdote”. Commercial sales followed. Ad Age says Howe formed The Lewis-Howe Company and began to market the tablets commercially in 1930; St. Louis Magazine says he teamed up with his uncle to start the business. Wikipedia dates the start of commercial production by the Lewis-Howe Company to the same year.

The name came from the public. According to Ad Age, Howe ran a joint promotion with a St. Louis radio station in 1930 to name the product, and the contest was won by a nurse who coined the phrase “Tums for the Tummy”. St. Louis Magazine tells it slightly differently: a nurse at Jefferson Barracks won the contest with the name “Tums”. Either way, the short, sound-driven name and its rhyming line arrived together, and Wikipedia lists “Tums for the Tummy” among the brand’s well-known advertising campaigns. The brand is stylized in capitals as TUMS, Wikipedia notes.

Advertising grew with the company. Ad Age says that for about a decade the account was handled by the St. Louis office of the New York agency Ruthrauff & Ryan, and that in the 1940s H.W. Kastor & Sons held it and placed Tums as sponsor of the radio quiz programme Pot o’ Gold. Newspaper advertising ran nationwide from 1951, and Ad Age describes a 1954 advertisement in the Miami News showing a matronly woman under the headline “Too Easily Tempted”. Television followed in 1961 with simple animated spots; David Van Brunt, a GlaxoSmithKline marketing director, summed them up for Ad Age as “Two spots, black-and-white, one talent and a voice-over.” He also told the magazine that the brand later moved away from advertisements that showed overweight people eating fatty food, because such images may have been off-putting.

From Lewis-Howe to Revlon, Beecham, GSK and Haleon.

The company stayed in local hands until the late 1970s. Wikipedia says that in 1978 the Lewis-Howe Company was purchased by Revlon of New York, so that it was no longer St. Louis–based; St. Louis Magazine gives the same year, and Wikipedia’s Revlon article lists the Lewis-Howe Company, makers of Tums, among Revlon’s acquisitions in 1978. Inside Revlon the brand was overseen by its Norcliff Thayer unit.

Norcliff Thayer then crossed the Atlantic. Wikipedia’s Beecham Group article says that in 1986 the British Beecham Group acquired Norcliff Thayer from Revlon. Beecham merged with SmithKline Beckman in 1989 to form SmithKline Beecham plc, and in 2000 SmithKline Beecham and Glaxo Wellcome merged to form GlaxoSmithKline, later GSK. Ad Age named both Norcliff-Thayer and SmithKline Beecham as earlier owners in its 2010 report, and quoted GlaxoSmithKline as the company that then owned and marketed the brand.

The most recent change came with a demerger. Wikipedia says Haleon was established on 18 July 2022 as a corporate spin-off of GSK’s consumer healthcare business, and Wikipedia’s Tums article names Haleon as the current owner. Haleon has owned Tums since 2022, and Wikipedia’s Haleon article lists it among the company’s brands alongside Sensodyne, which also came to Haleon from GSK.

Through all of those owners the tablets have stayed in one city. Wikipedia, citing St. Louis Magazine, says a plant originally built by Lewis-Howe in downtown St. Louis has been making the tablets since 1930, that the complex remains the main manufacturing site for Tums, and that GlaxoSmithKline renovated and modernised it during the 2000s. St. Louis Magazine places the factory in a redbrick building near the ballpark and says its interior is kept closed to outsiders. The magazine also records a confectionery footnote: when Menlo Smith was turning a powdered drink mix into a sweet, his next-door neighbour, the Tums factory, ran the powder through its tablet presses, and the result became SweeTARTS.

Design and documentation.

Over-the-counter remedy brands live on a crowded shelf, and their identities have to work at the distance of an aisle and at the closeness of a medicine cabinet. Much of that work is done by colour: a carton colour held steady over many years, a tablet, caplet or liquid with a colour of its own, and a logotype set large enough to be read at a glance.

These brands also carry text that design does not control. Packs for remedies sold without a prescription usually include a regulatory panel whose layout, headings and wording are shaped by the rules of each market, so the brand’s own voice has to sit beside a block of standard information rather than replace it.

Sound has played a part as well. Radio and television advertising gave many remedy names a slogan or a jingle, and for some the tune became as recognisable as the pack. Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name, colours and advertising have changed, keeping to what dated sources record.

A barbershop jingle set to the Dragnet theme.

If the name came from a radio contest, the brand’s most quoted sound came from television. Ad Age reports that in 1981 the agency Arnold, McGrath, Case & Taylor — later known as Arnold Worldwide — created the “Tums, Tum-Tum-Tum, Tums!” jingle, set to the dramatic opening bars of the theme from the television series Dragnet. Wikipedia describes it as a barbershop jingle sung to the theme music used in all versions of the crime drama, citing Mitzi Brunsdale’s reference book Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection (2010). St. Louis Magazine rendered it in 2018 as “Tums, de tum tum, Tums,” sung barbershop-quartet style.

The agency relationship behind it was long. Ad Age says Arnold McGrath held the Tums business for more than 30 years, across changes of ownership, and Van Brunt told the magazine that the music track “just stuck”: “Even today, when we show that jingle to consumer groups, it just brings a smile to people’s faces.” Before the jingle, Wikipedia records a 1970s television campaign built around a character called “Mother Tums”, whose line was “There, there!”

The work moved on after GlaxoSmithKline consolidated its agencies. Ad Age reported in 2010 that Tums was by then working with Grey Worldwide and had introduced a campaign called “Food Fight”, in which people were shown literally fighting with the foods they love — in one spot, a man is slapped around by a chicken wing. Van Brunt explained the shift to the magazine: it could be hard to break through with consumers who felt they already knew everything about the brand. St. Louis Magazine noted in 2018 that the barbershop advertisement had by then been replaced by a newer campaign.

The documented assets line up around the name. The 1930 radio contest produced it, the line “Tums for the Tummy” rhymed it, and the 1981 jingle turned it into the repeated “Tum-Tum-Tum” of the Dragnet bars, while Wikipedia records the written form in capitals as TUMS.

The other constant is place. Through Revlon, Beecham, SmithKline Beecham, GSK and now Haleon, Wikipedia and St. Louis Magazine both place production in the downtown St. Louis plant originally built by Lewis-Howe, so the brand’s owners have changed while its factory address has not.

For a design guide, Tums shows how a name chosen by radio listeners can be stretched into a slogan and then a jingle, giving an over-the-counter brand a recognisable sound that has stayed with it through several changes of owner. Compare it with Pepto-Bismol, another stomach-remedy name with a long American history, and Sensodyne, which Wikipedia also lists among Haleon’s brands. For this guide we use deep teal and warm gold on paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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