The of species Cyamopsis senegalensis was originally taken from Africa to South Asian subcontinent by Arab traders as fodder for horses probably sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries A.D.
Guar has been used for centuries in Pakistan and India as a vegetable (eaten green like snap beans), as cattle food, and as a green manure crop in agriculture. It was introduced to the United States from India in the early 1900s.
Guar gum has been introduced to the food industry in the 20th century as the main substitute for locust bean gum.
Guar gum industry developed in the 1940s and 1950s in United States. Guar was brought into the United States before World War I primarily as a green manure but was not used in industrial applications until 1943 and probably it was the main reason why it has been studied to a limited scale.
After World War II there was a major shortage of locust bean gun which adversely affected the textile and paper industries. At that time guar gum was found as the most suitable for scarce bean gum. In 1953 the extraction technology of guar gum was commercialized in USA and India after decade of period.
Its commercial evolution was developed at the University of Arizona by a man named Whistler (1948) at Purdue who closely studied the molecular structure of the guar plant.
History of guar gum
