Flavoured Nicotine Pouches Help The Market Grow

You may have heard of the saying “Variety is the spice of life” and if you haven’t, well you have now! This applies to so much in life I feel, having variety and options available for different things will keep you interested and intrigued to what else is out there.

And this applies to Nicotine Pouches as well believe it or not. People would soon get bored if there was just one flavour of Nicotine Pouches available, and only available in one specific nicotine strength as well. No variety means it would get boring fast and you like wouldn’t want to continue to use them!

In this article, I’m going to look at why having a variety of options available when it comes to flavours of Nicotine Pouches as well as Nicotine strengths is really important to keep people interested and also to keep people using them to abstain from smoking cigarettes. As well as this, I’ve also got some statistics to discuss that shows just how important flavoured nicotine pouches are for the sales and growth of the Nicotine Pouch industry.

Flavours weren’t always an option

Nicotine Pouches have been around for a lot longer than you may think. The first Nicotine Pouches were introduced onto the market by a small independent startup business in 2008, and this was then acquired in 2009 by RJ Reynolds, the Big Tobacco company which now goes under the name British American Tobacco which may sound more familiar to you than what RJ Reynolds sounds.

And it was a slow progressive process over the years for Nicotine Pouches to really start taking off and gaining traction, with 2019 being the pinnacle year for when Nicotine Pouch usage really grew in popularity. Up until this point, flavour options of Nicotine Pouches were nothing like what they are today. Meaning that the flavour options were fairly limited to what people could buy, which in turn could have played quite a significant part in the sales and use of Nicotine Pouches being as low as they were at this time.

Flavours available were pretty simple and straight forward, Tobacco and Mint/Menthol were the only options available to people and these are flavours that not everyone enjoys. Especially if they’ve recently quit smoking because they didn’t like the taste of tobacco as they definitely wouldn’t be picking a tobacco flavoured tobacco substitute!

Mint and Menthol flavours are produced by nearly all Nicotine Pouch manufacturers still, and these do sell fairly well as people like a minty taste as it refreshes the mouth so doubles up beside getting your nicotine fix which is handy! But they still aren’t for everyone, so it wasn’t until the introduction of more brands of Nicotine Pouches onto the market who came armed with a varied flavour selection in tow. Let’s look at this in more detail!

New Flavours = More Sales!

As I mentioned, it was in 2019 that Nicotine Pouches really saw a surge in sales, with 4% of the global population now opting to use Nicotine Pouches as their form of Nicotine Replacement Therapy. And this continued to grow slowly but surely, with the global rate of usage hitting 7% by the end of 2021.

What constituted to this was obviously more awareness of them globally, but also the amount of new brands of Nicotine Pouches grew quite significantly with that bought a lot more varied options when it came to flavour profiles. In 2022 alone, there were 42 new brands of Nicotine Pouches enter on to the market, taking the total to 138 brands of Nicotine Pouches by 62 companies which is impressive considering a decade prior there was a mere fraction of that in total.

I’ve had a look at some surveys and statistics relating to flavoured Nicotine Pouches and what I’ve found makes for some pretty interesting reading for sure.

Herbal flavour Nicotine Pouches prevail in the market of tobacco-free nicotine pouches which is quite interesting as they account for more than a third of all flavour options available on the market today. The key flavour seen in all of these pouches is a mint flavour of some kind with it being used in 30% of all SKUs. The other top flavours that are popular include menthol, spearmint, mango and peppermint so a little throwback to the early days of Nicotine Pouches, just with the addition of some fruitier flavours.

Mint is commonly seen as a stand alone flavour of Nicotine Pouch, but it’s also combined with other flavours like fruits or berries to create a flavour combination which helps boost Mint to having such a dominant presence of the market share when it comes to Nicotine Pouch flavours.

In 2022, the shares of fruit and “spicy” tasting Nicotine Pouches increased significantly from what they were previously. Mango and Citrus flavours prevail within the fruit category and within the spicy range, you might be wondering what on earth I’m talking about here, but there are several different brands of Nicotine Pouches entering on to the market now that feature Chilli or Liquorice as their prominent flavour. Some people like this as it’s normally combined with an Ice effect so it’s a bit of an assault on the senses…not for me personally!

On the subject of Ice and Cooling effects in Nicotine Pouches, it’s been determined that one fifth of all nicotine pouches have some sort of Ice and Cooling effect which I found interesting to be such a small fraction as I expected more to be honest. But what it is interesting, is that there are only two brands of Nicotine Pouches that offer a “flavour free” option, again I expected this number to be more.

Conclusion

I hope this article has given you some insight into how flavoured Nicotine pouches have evolved over the years and just how important they are for helping increase sales as well as tempting more people into trying them.

Looking over to the E-Liquid market, there has been several countries that have banned flavoured vape juice as they feel that this is too appealing to a younger audience and tempting them to want to try using an e-cigarette, so I hope that this will not be the case with flavoured Nicotine Pouches as they are an essential tool to help people quit smoking and stay away from cigarettes.