The William Wrigley Jr. Company is a company headquartered in the Wrigley Building in Chicago, Illinois. The company was founded on April 1, 1891, originally selling products such as soap and baking powder. In 1892, William Wrigley Jr., the company's founder, began packaging chewing gum with each can of baking powder. The chewing gum eventually became more popular than the baking powder itself and Wrigley's reoriented the company to produce the popular chewing gum. A ten pack of Wrigley’s gum was the first thing to ever be scanned with a barcode.
That pack of gum is now on display at the great Smithsonian in Washington D.C. today. The Wrigley Company now sells its products in 180 countries had has 140 factories worldwide. Wrigley purchased Life Savers and Altoids from Kraft Foods in 2005 for $1.5 billion. In 2008, Mars, Inc. announced that they were buying Wrigley’s for $23 billion. The headquarters of Wrigley is one of the most well known landmarks in Chicago.