If you have recently enjoyed eating ice cream, salad dressing, canned soup, or any gluten-free baked good that is not a crumbly mess, then you have xanthum gum to thank. This is not the type of gum you chew to keep your breath fresh; instead, it’s a powder that thickens and stabilizes foods. Xanthum gum has been added to beloved foods and on grocery store shelves since soon after it was developed by chemist Allene Jeanes in a United States Department of Agriculture lab.

Gums are all polysaccharides, a type of carbohydrate that is a chain of smaller sugar molecules- a bit like the paper ring chains that elementary school students make to count down to the holidays. In ice cream, these xanthum gum chains prevent ice crystals from forming. The result? A smooth and creamy dessert. In salad dressings, the chains keep oils and vinegars from separating. And in bread products, xanthum gum takes over gluten’s job of trapping air bubbles. This helps gluten-free dough expand as it bakes and giving it structure. A multi-purpose litle gum indeed!

Xanthum gum was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1968. Before that, the gums used in U.S. foods were plant-based and largely imported. Allene Jeanes and her colleagues at the Northern Regional Research Lab were searching for other options that could be made domestically. That search led them to bacteria called Xanthomonas campestris.

After Xanthomonas campestris bacteria eat, they make slime and then cover themselves with it for protection. That slime is xanthum gum! If that sounds super gross, rest assured that the slime is cleaned and dried into a powder before it is ever used as an ingredient or is packaged for sale. For her work with such far-reaching impact, Allene Jeanes was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Thanks to Jeanes’ federally funded research, xanthum gum helps power a wide swath of the U.S. food industry, and is now the most mass-produced polysaccharide in the world. (It is also an ingredient in many cosmetics and automobile products.)