Swedish Match Starting Nationwide Rollout Of Tobacco-Free Nicotine Pouch Product

Source from:  Richmond.com 04/08/2019

A Richmond company is rolling out a new alternative to conventional tobacco products at retail stores nationwide starting Monday.

The latest entry into the evolving market for novel nicotine products is an oral product sold under the brand name ZYN.

Manufactured by Swedish Match, a Sweden-based tobacco company with its North American headquarters in Richmond, ZYN looks like other types of pouch smokeless tobaccos, which are sold in cans containing small tea bag-like pouches of tobacco that a consumer places between the cheek and gums.

The key difference with ZYN is that its pouches contain no tobacco leaf. Instead, the pouches are filled with powdery nicotine salts derived from tobacco, along with various flavorings, sweeteners and a few other ingredients.

“We extract all of the tobacco out of the product,” said Joe Ackerman, marketing director for Swedish Match. “For years and years, the tobacco consumer has kind of identified nicotine and tobacco together — it has always been in unison. This, we feel, allows the consumer to separate nicotine from tobacco.”

ZYN was developed in Sweden, but Swedish Match has invested heavily to introduce it in the United States, building a new production facility at one of its factories in Owensboro, Ky. “We made a multimillion-dollar investment to be able to produce ZYN here in the U.S.,” Ackerman said.

ZYN falls into the mix with various other alternative nicotine products, such as electronic cigarettes and vaping devices, that companies have been introducing to give tobacco users a way to obtain the addictive agent nicotine while reducing exposure to other harmful agents in tobacco.

In December, for instance, Henrico County-based Altria Group Inc., the nation’s largest tobacco company, agreed to spend $12.8 billion to buy a stake in the fast-growing electronic cigarette company Juul Labs Inc.

The long-term health effects of the various alternative products are unknown, and some tobacco-control and public health advocates argue that such products merely keep people addicted and could be gateway products for youth. Under Food and Drug Administration rules, companies cannot make explicit health claims about alternative tobacco products without approval from the federal agency.

Swedish Match is seeking FDA approval to market another of its smokeless products called snus as a “modified-risk” product, but it has not yet sought approval to do that with ZYN.

Ackerman described ZYN as another step on a “continuum of risk,” by offering adult tobacco users a smoke-free nicotine product without direct exposure to tobacco leaf, which contains carcinogens such as nitrosamines.

“We are trying to develop products on the continuum of risk that are safer alternatives for consumers,” he said.

The company lists the ingredients of ZYN on its website, said Ryan Ganley, senior brand manager for Swedish Match. “We think that transparency is important,” he said, adding that ZYN also is sold in childproof cans.

Consumers have shown “great potential” to switch to lower-risk products, and the early sales results for ZYN show it could grow quickly, said David T. Sweanor, a professor of law at the University of Ottawa and a public health advocate who has argued for policies to help smokers switch to reduced-risk products.

“Swedish Match is trying to play Google to the cigarette trade’s Yellow Pages,” he said.

Swedish Match first introduced ZYN at a limited number of retail stores in Colorado in 2016, later expanding sales to about 14,000 stores in 11 Western states. The company plans to have the product in 60,000 stores nationwide by the end of this year.

The company is selling ZYN in six flavors and two nicotine strengths. In Virginia, it will retail at $4.29 to $4.69 for a can of 15 pouches.

Swedish Match does not disclose specific sales numbers for ZYN in the United States, but the company’s 2018 annual report to shareholders said factory shipments of “nicotine pouches without tobacco” and sales of snus outside of Scandinavia grew 91 percent from 13.2 million cans in 2017 to 25.2 million cans in 2018. ZYN was responsible for most of the year-over-year shipment growth.

“With the positive results, we feel confident this will be a product that does well on a national basis,” Ackerman said.  Enditem