Name: What Zyn’s Explosive Rise Means for the Tobacco Industry
Uploaded: 2024-04-09T04:01:00Z
Duration: 8 min 15 s
Description: Oral nicotine product Zyn has skyrocketed in sales and popularity in recent years. This growth has brought controversy and highlights the shifting landscape of the U.S. tobacco market. Photo illustration: Alexander Hotz

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Oral nicotine product Zyn has skyrocketed in sales and popularity in recent years. This growth has brought controversy and highlights the shifting landscape of the U.S. tobacco market. Photo illustration: Alexander Hotz

https://m.wsj.net/video/20240409/429586f4-1e78-4d50-a8f7-8d1df363d5d3/3/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

What Zyn’s Explosive Rise Means for the Tobacco Industry

Alexander: These white pouches may be the future of the tobacco industry, but there's no tobacco inside.

The main ingredient inside ZYNs is pure nicotine.

Alexander: These are ZYN nicotine pouches. The oral nicotine product comes in these cans. You may have seen them for sale in convenience stores, gas stations, and even your local pharmacy.\, or on social media, where they've birthed a devoted subculture.

Good morning, boys. Poppin' a little.

Alexander: Over the past year, sales of ZYN have skyrocketed. In the fourth quarter of 2023, 116 million cans were sold in the US, a 78% increase over the same period a year earlier.

ZYN is definitely having a moment.

Pouch packed with problems.

Alexander: But ZYN's remarkable success has provoked a backlash and thrust it into the culture war.

Many people see it as a threat.

Alexander: So what can we learn about ZYN when we test in in the lab, and how transformative a product could ZYN be for the tobacco industry?

Today we're gonna be finding out what's in ZYNs.

Alexander: Ben Katz is an analytical chemist at UC, Irvine, specializing in mass spectrometry. Outside of his university work, Katz has been testing nicotine pouch products.

Ben: What's in the pouch: spearmint edition.

Alexander: And sharing the findings on his TikTok channel, MassSpecEverything.

Ben: Now we're gonna test a Chill, the wintergreen.

Alexander: Today, Katz is testing six different ZYN flavors.

All right, so now we're going to be analyzing the samples on the mass spectrometer. A mass spectrometer is capable of weighing the exact mass of a molecule so that you can determine the composition of the chemical structure and identify what is in a sample. Oh, it works. In the data analysis software, we see a series of peaks. There is a common peak that's in all the samples, and it's the most abundant peak in all the samples. That is our nicotine peak. Based on these tests, nicotine is the bioactive molecule in ZYN. And the nicotine is the only tobacco-related alkaloid that we can see in this product.

ZYN looks like a little teabag. It's a tiny, little, white pouch that tucks inside the cheek. And inside, there is no tobacco leaf. There is cellulose, or wood pulp, along with some artificial sweeteners and flavorings and nicotine.

Alexander: In January, Senator Chuck Schumer called for a federal crackdown on the pouches.

I'm delivering a warning to parents, because these nicotine pouches seem to lock their sights on young kids, teenagers and even lower, and then use the social media to hook 'em.

Alexander: This scrutiny has, in turn, triggered another chapter in America's culture war, with some on the right declaring a ZYNsurrection. Senator Thom Tillis responded on X with a message that said, "Come and take it, Chuck."

So we're gonna make a ZYN birthday cake.

Alexander: Fueling ZYN's rise are self-styled ZYNfluencers, who feature the nicotine pouches in their social media content. ♪ Upper decky gum pillies ♪ ♪ Upper decky lip cushions ♪

Alexander: Unlike cigarette brands, nicotine pouch brands are permitted to advertise on billboards and television. And unlike e-cigarettes, such as JUUL, they are sold in fruity flavors. There are lots of brands of pouches on the market, including Rogue, VELO, and Lucy, but it's ZYN that has emerged as the Kleenex of nicotine pouches.

ZYN is sold by Swedish Match, a Swedish smokeless tobacco company.

Alexander: In 2022, tobacco giant Philip Morris International acquired Swedish Match in a $16 billion deal. Just last year, Philip Morris shipped 385 million ZYN cans in the US, and this year, the company forecasts shipment volumes of about 520 million cans. ZYN now represents 24% of the smokeless category, which includes traditional smokeless tobacco, such as Copenhagen, Grizzly, and Skoal.

Nicotine pouches are still in their early days in terms of their share of the overall tobacco market. They still would have a long, long way to go to really take a bite out of cigarettes.

Alexander: Despite the brand's success, ZYN's unofficial brand ambassadors have created a headache for ZYN's owner, Philip Morris.

The most famous ZYNfluencer is Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.

ZYN is not a sin.

He is sort of a self-appointed and unofficial ZYN brand spokesman.

Alexander: In October, Tucker Carlson made unfounded claims that ZYN helps with focus and erectile dysfunction.

ZYN is a powerful work enhancer and also a male enhancer, if you know what I mean.

Philip morris has pushed back very hard on these claims and has actually sort of asked his team to cease and desist on that.

Alexander: Philip Morris said it has reached out to social media influencers, asking them not to promote ZYN in any form where the audience includes people under 21. The company said its products are intended for adults who already use nicotine.

Senator Schumer's interest in ZYN, I think, is related to his longstanding interest in tobacco control, especially risk to youth. However, the national data, survey data tells us that kids are not really using this product at significantly high levels. So there's not really evidence for any kind of epidemic. A 2023 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that around 1.5% of middle school and high school students reported using nicotine pouches in the last 30 days. Some public health experts say nicotine pouches like ZYN could save lives by helping adult cigarette smokers switch to a much safer alternative.

Would I consider, you know, recommending ZYN to friends or family that smoked cigarettes? Yes I would. We know that smoking is bad, bad, bad for you.

Anecdotally, I've heard from e-cigarette users who have switched over to ZYN. It's very, very hard to detect that someone has a nicotine pouch in their mouth. I've done interviews with folks who would talk to me for half an hour, and I never noticed until, at the end of the interview, they would take the pouch out.

Alexander: According to the FDA, nicotine is addictive, but by itself, it doesn't cause cancer or lung disease.

But we don't really, you know, 100% know what the long-term effects of nicotine use are. However, we do have some pretty good indications from evidence that comes from other parts of the world. So for example, the country of Sweden is famous for using a product called Swedish snus.

Alexander: Snus is a moist, pasteurized, smokeless oral tobacco product, which is placed under the lip to deliver nicotine through the gums. It has been used by consumers in Sweden since the 1970s.

And this is a product that's in some ways similar to ZYN. It's actually the precursor to ZYN. And it's known to be much less toxic compared to other oral tobacco products.

Alexander: Since snus pouches were first introduced in Sweden in 1973, smoking rates have fallen considerably.

Sweden now has the lowest smoking rate of all of the European Union countries. They also now have the lowest rates of smoking-related cancers. So that tells me that people who use clean nicotine products are much less likely to develop serious diseases that we know are related to smoking.

So Schumer asked the FDA to investigate, and the FDA already has been conducting a review of ZYN. Because all nicotine pouch manufacturers were required to submit their products for FDA review in order to get authorization to keep them on the US market.

Alexander: If the agency does authorize a nicotine pouch, the authorization might come with marketing and flavor restrictions.

The Rise of Zyn: The Oral Nicotine Product Going Viral 

News moves fast, and there's not always time to untangle the complex forces driving the day's biggest stories. WSJ Explains breaks down big market moves, business and economic trends, and scientific developments to help you stay ahead of the curve.

The Rise of Zyn: The Oral Nicotine Product Going Viral

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