Nicotine pouches are becoming increasingly popular

Despite the tobacco industry staying consistent in their offerings to the consumer market over the years, the last years have seen huge changes in the end-user behaviour for tobacco products. In recent years, consumers have already started drifting away from the classic tobacco products like cigarettes due to health reasons, but in the last few months, this trend has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organisation produces more and more evidence that smoking increases the risk of death from COVID. Public Health authorities in various countries have also implemented measures to reduce classic tobacco usage and have started to push for product substitution away from cigarettes.

Product Substitution

A lot of the recent innovation in the market has been new products that reduce tobacco consumption's perceived and actual harm. E-cigarettes were a short-lived example of this innovation and the resultant hype around the differences to classic tobacco products caused sales to spike over the last few years, enough to establish a secondary industry. Another, yet lesser known, example of innovation is the nicotine pouch. Tobacco-free nicotine pouches, in different flavors, have been available on the Swedish market for a number of years. Due to the fact that nicotine pouches are not yet regulated, the availability is slowly spreading to other European countries and even to the USA.

Advantages of Nicotine Pouches

Nicotine Pouches are discreet in usage and are placed under the top lip where the flavour and nicotine are gradually released. Many smoke-free options such as nicotine pouches are also available in a tobacco-free option which gives them an overall more hygienic feel. The taste of tobacco can be heavy and bitter, therefore more people are switching to nicotine pouches for the cleaner after taste. Nicotine pouches also have the benefit of eliminating the second-hand smoke hazard so that bystanders are not affected at all. Another benefit of using pouches is that the white options do not cause any teeth discolouration as with most tobacco products.