Though the quality of flavor is often debatable, sticks of bubblegum have been packed in alongside trading cards for decades now. And while baseball cards and gum are a common pairing, they weren’t always that way. In fact, it took many years before someone came up with the thought.

Baseball cards were first packed in with cigarettes in the 1880s, though the athletes weren’t the only stars featured on cards – some sets also included vaudeville actors and war heroes. But even at that time, laws were starting to be enacted that prohibited the sale of tobacco to children, and the cards themselves didn’t carry much of an appeal to adults.

By the 1930s, the Fleer Company and the Goudey Gum Company began packing in baseball cards with their gum. Topps began printing cards in 1951, and that first year also included candy – though it was taffy, not gum, which was considered disastrous as the taffy itself picked up the flavor of the card varnish. The next year, they too switched to gum.

By the 1990s card companies had generally phased out packing in gum with their packs, largely because people had complained that the candy was staining the cards themselves; there have been a few attempts more recently to bring the trend back to varying degrees of success.