What’s in ZYN? Exploring the Ingredients of Nicotine Pouches

The future of the tobacco industry is actually a product that has no tobacco inside: All-White Nicotine Pouches. The main ingredient inside these white pouches is pure nicotine, and the leading brand is ZYN.

ZYN is sold by the Swedish smokeless tobacco company, Swedish Match. In 2022, tobacco giant Philip Morris International acquired Swedish Match in a $16 billion deal. Last year, Philip Morris shipped 385 million cans of ZYN in the US, and this year, they expect to ship around 520 million cans. ZYN now accounts for 24% of the smokeless category.

What’s in ZYN?

Ben Katz, an analytical chemist at UC Irvine specializing in mass spectrometry, has been testing nicotine pouch products. He shares his findings on his TikTok channel, Mass Spec Everything.

Katz after testing six different ZYN flavors:

“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. 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.”

Potential Public Health Impact

Some public health experts believe that nicotine pouches like ZYN could save lives by helping adult cigarette smokers switch to a much safer alternative. While nicotine pouches are still in the early stages of capturing the tobacco market, they have a long way to go before significantly reducing cigarette use.

Ray Niaura, Professor of Global Public Health at NYU, states:

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

According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “Nicotine is addictive, but by itself, it doesn’t cause cancer or lung disease.”

Niaura further adds:

“We don’t really, 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. For example, the country of Sweden is famous for using a product called Snus.”

The Impact of Snus in Sweden

Snus is a moist, pasteurized, smokeless oral tobacco product placed under the lip to deliver nicotine through the gums. It has been used by consumers in Sweden since the 1970s. Similar to ZYN, Snus is its precursor and is known to be much less toxic than other oral tobacco products.

Since Snus pouches were introduced in Sweden in 1973, smoking rates have fallen considerably.

“Sweden now has the lowest smoking rate of all the European Union countries. They also now have the lowest rates of smoking-related cancer. 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.”

Ray Niarua

Sweden is about to become smoke-free, which is defined as less than 5% of adults smoking. Smoking rates have fallen from 15% to 5.6% over the past 15 years by making alternative products widely available.

Sources

• The Wall Street Journal
• Smoke Free Sweden
• Bloomberg
• Swedish Match