Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush

To visitors, Sweden is as remarkable for what is absent as for what is present. Walking around Stockholm, you hear little noise from traffic, because Swedes have so aggressively adopted electric vehicles. (They also seem constitutionally averse to honking.) Streets and sidewalks are exceptionally free from debris, in part because of the country’s robust anti-littering programs. And the air bears virtually no trace of cigarette smoke. During five days I spent in Sweden this January, I could count the number of smokers I encountered on one hand, and I saw no one pulling on a vape. In November, 2024, Sweden was declared “smoke-free” because its adult smoking rate had dipped below five per cent. As smoking has declined, so have related illnesses, such as emphysema; Sweden has one of the lowest rates of lung cancer in the E.U. This shift is broadly described in academic papers as “the Swedish Experience.”

And yet the Swedes have an immense appetite for nicotine, the addictive chemical found in tobacco. About a third of Swedish people consume nicotine, and they mostly get their fix from snus—small, gossamer pouches that look like dollhouse pillows, which users nestle in their gums. Snus pouches deliver nicotine to the bloodstream through sensitive oral membranes; Swedes refer to the resulting buzz as the nicokick.

“Snus is the first thing I take every morning when I wake up,” Niklas Runsten, an energetic thirty-three-year-old podcast producer, told me. “It’s the last thing I take out before I brush my teeth.” We were sitting in his office, in Stockholm, and he was fondling a brown, hockey-puck-shaped tin. “I’m awake approximately seventeen hours a day, and I probably have a snus in my mouth for sixteen hours and thirty-two minutes,” he said.

Scandinavians have a proud history of snus usage. During the mid-seventeenth century, ground-up sniffing tobacco became popular in the French royal court and made its way to Sweden. Later, working-class Swedes started adding liquid to the powder and placing it against their gums, as a claylike paste. The preportioned pouches that are common today were introduced in the nineteen-seventies, as more people turned to snus in order to stop smoking. In the early nineteen-nineties, when Sweden held a referendum on whether to join the E.U., which had a bloc-wide snus ban, voters adorned their cars with bumper stickers that read, “E.U.? Not without my snus.” Ultimately, Sweden was granted an exemption from the ban in exchange for stricter warning labels.

The most committed Swedish snus enthusiasts sometimes talk like sommeliers, capable of detecting subtle differences in tobacco quality and flavor. Before he shut down Fäviken, his two-Michelin-star restaurant, the renowned Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson was known to offer patrons a portion of snus at the end of their meal. In Skansen, a part of Stockholm that’s home to a children’s petting zoo and farmstead tours, there is a Snus and Match Museum, funded in part by the tobacco company Swedish Match. Snus has also served as an economic engine: in 1915, Sweden nationalized its tobacco production to generate revenue for the military and a universal pension system for its citizens.

Runsten started snusing at eighteen, as soon as he was legally allowed. He remembers what drew him to it. “A friend told me that the best thing about snus is that you get a present every day,” he said. “When you finish your meal, you take a little present. It’s like a gift you give yourself, and without the consequences of smoking. It was the romantic part of snus.”

Until recently, the word “snus” referred solely to a pungent product made of tobacco leaves. But, over the past decade, the earthy brown substance has been joined by white snus, a new product with a characteristically Swedish design elegance. White snus, which consists of pure nicotine mixed with filling agents, has little natural odor and does not stain the teeth the way that the traditional kind can. It was developed by Swedish scientists to appeal to women, a constituency that hadn’t historically taken to brown snus. The creators also had ambitions to eventually reach Americans.

“From a branding perspective, the white snus is, like, a genius thing,” Runsten continued. He pulled out one of his own pouches, which was brown. “This couldn’t reach Los Angeles, because it’s something that tastes like shit!” He surveyed two of his colleagues, Jonatan Peterson and Hugo Lavett. “Your dad snused?” he asked Lavett. Yes. “Your dad?” he asked Peterson. “No, but all of my friends’ dads,” Peterson replied. “But no mothers whatsoever. Our mothers’ generation never would have.”

White snus pouches have become popular in the U.S., though American mothers don’t seem to have adopted them, either. Zyn, the nicotine pouch launched by Swedish Match, was introduced to the U.S. market in 2014 and, thanks to champions such as Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, became a fixture of the so-called manosphere. The tobacco company Philip Morris International, which acquired Swedish Match in 2022, said that it shipped 131.6 million cannisters of Zyn to the U.S. in the first quarter of 2024—an eighty-per-cent increase from the same period the previous year.

Swedish Match estimates that about seventy per cent of cannisters in the U.S. are purchased by men. “I’m sure we have women who buy Zyn. I’m sure we do,” Tom Allen, the western-region director at Smoker Friendly, the large chain of tobacco stores where the product was first tested in the U.S., said. “I just don’t remember if I’ve ever seen a woman buy them in any of our stores.”

In certain settings, Zyn is ubiquitous: the imprint of a cannister in a pair of khakis is a signature of the finance sector; golf courses have posted signs imploring patrons not to dispose of their pouches in urinals. Carlson has used the product to incite a masculinity arms race: after Philip Morris disputed a joke he made about Zyn being a “male enhancer,” he decried it as “not a brand for men” and launched a competitor pouch, called ALP—the brand that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was said to be using during his confirmation hearing. The actor Josh Brolin told the podcaster Marc Maron that he keeps a Zyn in his lip twenty-four hours a day. “I’m not fucking lying,” he said. He popped open a cannister. “My wife would hear this in the middle of the night. I don’t even know I’m doing it. I’m asleep.”

In Sweden, the white pouches are not exactly an emblem of virility. “When I was working in Stockholm, the group of girls on my team, we all snused through every meeting,” Verona Farrell, a columnist for Vogue Scandinavia, told me. You can buy pouches in highly curated nicotine depots, and the white snus flavors—apple mint, jasmine tea, pomegranate melon—appeal to refined, diet-conscious tastes. “In Sweden, the Tucker Carlson thing was a laughingstock,” Runsten said. “Everything they talk about is related to masculinity,” Peterson, his colleague, added. “And they’re doing the most girl thing I know.”

In 2008, three Swedish scientists gathered in a laboratory in Helsingborg to test white snus. Two of them, Thomas Ericsson and Per-Gunnar Nilsson, had backgrounds in pharmaceuticals—they had worked on antibiotics and aspirin, among other drugs. (The third scientist was Thomas’s son, a chemical engineer named Robert.) Their new venture was “a dynamic institute of fun,” Ericsson, who is now seventy-four, told me recently. When testing various nicotine concentrations, the trio used one another as lab rats, referring to a rather vague measuring stick: “Tell me when you get dizzy.” Ericsson was already a regular snus user, while his son and Nilsson were not. They tended to get dizzy much faster than Ericsson did.

In the eighties and nineties, Ericsson had worked at LEO, a Swedish pharmaceutical company whose flagship product is Nicorette, the nicotine-replacement gum. He had also developed and patented tobacco-processing protocols that helped lower carcinogenic chemicals in traditional snus. (By the twenty-tens, the level of harmful chemicals in snus had been significantly reduced.) At one point, Ericsson was tasked with raising the nicotine levels in Nicorette, but the higher concentrations led to side effects like hiccupping and stomach pain. As an alternative, his team conceived of the white nicotine pouch, a cleaner riff on the traditional product. Because it would be lodged in the gums, it would produce less saliva than chewing gum, and the digestive side effects could be avoided. Ericsson began to experiment in his garage, and by 1990 he and some colleagues were working on a patented white snus product.

“You always have a philosophy,” he told me. “We said, ‘It must satisfy an important medical need.’ ” We were sitting in a loud, dark restaurant in Helsingborg, which is home to so many nicotine-related companies that Ericsson calls it Nicotine Valley. Ericsson is a meticulous speaker, and throughout the conversation he produced diagrams in a notebook. “How many people in the United States die yearly due to smoking?” he asked. I said half a million. In Sweden, it was just a few thousand, Ericsson told me, scribbling in his notepad. “Who was smoking?” he asked. He had a hypothesis based on industry data: “Swedish females between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six,” he answered, drawing the female-gender symbol. Among Swedish men, brown snus had already provided a compelling alternative to cigarettes. Ericsson hoped the white pouches would appeal to women, and to a U.S. market that had largely rejected traditional snus.

“If I go back then, we think, Snus: brown, smelly, bitter, not sexy,” Ericsson continued. “So how do you make this attractive for females between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six?” In business presentations, he has often used a metaphor: If cigarettes are standard gasoline-powered cars, brown snus is diesel—an effective alternative, but not different enough to shift the paradigm. White snus, on the other hand, is an electric vehicle. “The big car manufacturers, they will only change if they have an alternative,” he said. “The cigarette companies will not change if they don’t have competition.”

Many iterations of Ericsson’s project were thwarted. At one point, a group of investors who had financial interests in traditional tobacco products decided not to compete with the industry, and halted development. He and his colleagues also had to choose whether to sell their product as a pharmaceutical, like Nicorette, or as a life-style product, like traditional snus. Ericsson did not want to pursue the pharmaceutical path. After working on Nicorette, he had become skeptical of medicalized smoking-cessation efforts. “I didn’t like for pharmaceutical products to create dependencies. It’s more ethical that a person decides by themselves,” he said. “We knew that consumers would like to be free and not go to a pharmacy. They are not sick.”