Who Will Survive the ‘Zynpocalypse’?
Behind the bulletproof glass of the Stone Smoke Shop, a drab walk-in closet of a store in lower Manhattan, is a Willy Wonka stockpile of nicotine. Vapes in every variety — shiny ones, digital ones, in every color, flavored any way you can imagine — along with rolling papers, cigarettes, and assorted paraphernalia. On Tuesday, a Wall Street–type guy rushed in and asked the guy behind the counter, in kind of a panic, if he had any eye drops. But what you can’t get there is one of Philip Morris International’s most popular, fastest growing products: Zyns. Look closely at the brand’s display case and it’s full of $8 nicotine pouches by another name. Each with the same round tins, and brand names written in bold white letters — the Zynposters.
If the 2010s were the decade when Juuls changed the way people smoked, Zyns have become the mint-flavored, penny-size giant of the nicotine business this decade. The flavored nicotine pouches are wildly popular, especially among men — in the mouths of sports stars, on the bench at Sam Bankman-Fried’s federal criminal trial, and the centerpiece in Tucker Carlson’s dubious pharmacopeia. More than 1.2 billion tins were sold last year, more than doubling since 2021, and Wall Street analysts project that 2024 will be even bigger. Demand has been so high that users are facing a Zyn shortage, leaving shelves bare for the better part of this year.
The Zyn shortage has hit NYC.
— Zyn Capital (@zyn_addict) May 15, 2024
Just got the last $10 spearmint can my from my usual guy.
This is the worst thing to ever happen to NYC.
In June, the shortage got worse after the attorney general for Washington, D.C., sent Philip Morris a subpoena about flavored pouches. Since 2022, the District of Columbia has banned the sale of flavored tobacco — which would have ruled out most of Zyn’s most popular products, with names like Wintergreen and Citrus. In response, PMI admitted that “there have been sales of flavored nicotine pouch products in D.C.,” both online and in stores, and then cut back on online sales throughout the country. The online sales have “only represented a very small percentage of nationwide volumes,” a Philip Morris spokesman said, but it coincided with a broader disappearance of the product in stores across the country.
For desperate users, it’s the Zynpocalypse. The current shortage is “widespread,” Goldman Sachs analyst Bonnie Herzog wrote in a note, affecting more than 60 percent of shops, “with many expressing frustration given the strength of demand going unmet.” Or, as one redditor put it, “I’m done going from store to store like a crackhead when Zyns are clearly never coming back to being reliably available.”
Cracking open a new can of 6mg Cool Mint Zyn during the shortage: pic.twitter.com/CJX5yAaHjv
— Friday Beers (@Friday_Beers) June 26, 2024
Smokeless tobacco in the form of dip, pouches, and snuff have existed since the 17th century, and people have been chewing tobacco as far back as they’ve been growing it. Zyn’s origins are far more contemporary. The pouches contain no tobacco, but rather a mix of powdered nicotine. Created by the Swedish Match Corporation, they were first sold in the U.S. in 2014 and PMI completed its $16 billion purchase of the company last year.
Over the last 12 months, the market for powdered nicotine products has raked in $9.9 billion in sales in the U.S., nearly twice as much as vapes, according to the Goldman Sachs industry report. While cigarettes are still the dominant nicotine product in the U.S. — making about six times as much as the so-called “smokeless” products — it’s clear that the industry is trying to sell more. Cigarette-smoking rates have been falling since the U.S. Surgeon General declared it a public hazard in 1957. Four decades later, the decline accelerated after the four largest tobacco companies agreed to settle lawsuits alleging that they knew smoking caused cancer, setting aside hundreds of billions of dollars to fund cessation campaigns. In 2021, cigarette-smoking rates fell to about 11.5 percent, down from about 45 percent in the 1950s. Whether it is marketing, or simply just a recognition of the market, Altria, the owner of Marlboro, has trademarked the phrase “Moving Beyond Smoking.”
Today, Zyn is by far the biggest name in nicotine pouches, commanding 74 percent of U.S. sales in March, “despite a 15 cent per can price increase in March,” the company noted. It’s not a surprise, then, that all the Big Tobacco competitors have their Zynposters to try to soak up the rest of the market. R.J. Reynolds sells Velo, Altria — which no longer owns Philip Morris International — sells On!, and the brands go on from there. Even Dennis Rodman is trying to get in on it.
“A lot of it is experience with the brand,” said Catharine Dockery, the founder of VC firm Vice Ventures, which invests in two Zynposters — one, called Lucy, has similar flavors and vibrant ice-cream colors as the Zyn package. The other, Black Buffalo, has sponsors like the Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden. Zyns, vapes, and the like as “high margin, high repeat” items, Dockery said. This shortage, she said, is “a great opportunity for adult smokers or adult nicotine users who already use nicotine to try these other brands. But it’s just really difficult to overtake a company that has 74 percent market share, even if they’re completely out of stock through year-end.”
When I spoke with industry executives about the Zyn shortage, they were quick to tell me that the flood of competitors was, in fact, good for the general public. “The big risk for public health is that there’s a shortage of pouch products, and you would have people going back to cigarettes,” David Renteln, CEO and co-founder of Lucy, told me. This seemed, instinctually, wrong, given the tobacco industry’s history of lies. And when I brought this claim to Daniel P. Giovenco, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, he called it “conjecture.” But, he added, it may not be totally wrong.
“Whenever I talk to the media about harm reduction, I feel nervous because it’s so controversial,” Giovenco, who studies how tobacco products are sold and marketed, said. “But we also have to do our job as scientists to fairly assess this. Are these products less risky? If so, could they play a role in improving population health or reducing health inequities? I think that’s a fair point to evaluate, but it does generate quite a bit of controversy. Sometimes people think that you’re on the side of the industry if you acknowledge that there might be some harm-reduction potential for these, when that’s not true at all.”
Addiction, of course, is about the most powerful market motivator there is — one that cuts across any racial, age, political, or class line. The media coverage that has singled out Zyn as a shibboleth for conservatism — or mascuzynity — misses that demographic splits among male and female pouch users aren’t very different from smokers. There is some evidence — though it is too early to tell conclusively, and some studies are industry-funded — that products using pure or synthetic nicotine, rather than tobacco leaves, have fewer carcinogens, even though they can still constrict blood flow to the mouth. “I don’t know if identity politics is the right word, but there are certainly perceptions of what type of people use what type of products,” Giovenco said. “You don’t want any group to use any product in an ideal world. But I think the danger comes when people might say, ‘Oh, that product is not for us’ and continue to use the most harmful product.”