Nicotine pouches are rapidly reshaping the nicotine market—but what does the data actually tell us about this shift?
In this GFN Science Lab presentation, Marina Murphy explores how consumer purchasing patterns have changed across Scandinavia between 2018 and 2025, revealing a striking transformation in the relationship between nicotine pouches and traditional oral products such as snus.
Transcription:
GFN Science Lab 2 — Marina Murphy
2026-06-04 · 14:00-15:30 (Europe/Warsaw) · Global Forum on Nicotine 2026
Carrie Wade 0:00:10
We will move on to Marina and the hot topic of the year, which is nicotine pouches. We'll learn about sales data in Scandinavia.
Marina Murphy 0:00:22
Hello, GFN Science Lab. My name is Marina Murphy and I work for Scientific Affairs at Hype Group. In this presentation, I will talk about nicotine pouch sales trends in Scandinavia from 2018 to 2025. As a disclaimer, I am an employee of Hype Limited, which is an affiliate of Hype Group, the funder of this work.
Hype is an e-commerce company that sells non combustible nicotine products in several markets. The group operates independently and is not under the ownership or control of any pharmaceutical or tobacco manufacturers. Nicotine products have been around for about 10 years now and the US is the largest market.
Studies in both the US and the UK show that daily use of nicotine pouches is most common among current or former tobacco or nicotine users and remains rare among people who have never used nicotine. A study published in The Lancet recently, for example, found that most nicotine pouch users in the UK also smoke or vape.
and that many more smokers are now using nicotine pouches to try to quit smoking. So these findings suggest that nicotine pouches may be helping to displace more harmful nicotine products.
In this study, we set out to determine whether a pattern similar to what we're seeing in the US and the UK, that is pouches replacing other tobacco products, is emerging into Nordic countries where snus has at least in the recent past been the dominant product.
Snus is similar to nicotine pouches in that it is a product containing nicotine that is contained within a small pouch and placed under the lip. To do this study, we analysed 19 million anonymized age-verified purchases of snus and nicotine pouches from seven of our e-commerce websites.
The results show that nicotine pouches suppressed snus in market share in 2025 in both countries studied. In Sweden, the nicotine pouch volume sales rose from 5% in 2018 to 55% in 2025, while snus sales declined from 95% to 45%. In Norway, the nicotine pouch market share rose from 22% to 56% over the same period of time, with snus declining from 78% to 44%.
This displacement seems to be driven by women. You can see from these graphs that women started to purchase more nicotine pouches than snus as far back as 2022. In both countries, however, men were still purchasing more snus than nicotine pouches at the end of 2025.
But if current trends continue, this may well change in the near future, possibly this year, 2026, we might start to see men also purchasing more nicotine pouches than snus. So we seem to be seeing a clear trend emerging in these countries, the US, UK, Norway and Sweden, where nicotine pouches are starting to replace more harmful traditional tobacco and nicotine products.
Nicotine pouches have fewer and less toxicants than other products, placing them at the lower risk end of the risk continuum alongside medicinal nicotine replacement therapies.
From a public health perspective, the key opportunity here is to support switching from high risk products like cigarettes to lower risk alternatives like nicotine pouches, alongside clear and proportionate regulation, strong measures to prevent youth access and support for people who may want to stop using nicotine altogether. The key takeaways from this study are threefold.
First, in 2025, nicotine pouches overtook snus and market share in both Norway and Sweden. Second, this fits with longstanding Nordic harm reduction patterns, whereby shifts from cigarettes to snus have historically been linked to major declines in smoking, with Sweden now having the lowest smoking weight in Europe.
And third, the public health impact will depend on getting regulation right, both in terms of preventing youth access and in supporting smokers who want to switch to lower risk products. This study has already been published and you can find an open access article online in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance.
Finally, I'd like to acknowledge my colleagues, Lindsay, Diane and the Consumer Insights team at HYPE for their contributions.
Carrie Wade 0:04:44
Any questions? I have a question. Big surprise, I'm sure. Would you expect, since this data comes from your e-commerce platform, would you expect this to be replicated in other retail platforms like convenience stores?
Marina Murphy 0:05:03
I think it's indicative of what's happening because if you look at, and of course most of the evidence base is the US because that's the biggest market, But if you look at the things that have been published, we are seeing that nicotine pouch users, as I said in the video, that most of those people weren't nicotine naive. They were people who were using other products.
So I do think it's indicative of what's happening across the board in all the various markets and across all the different sales channels.
Carrie Wade 0:05:35
I don't know if you were in the TPD session yesterday, but Carissa has very strong opinions on how she would never, ever, ever use snus again because she thinks they're gross. And nicotine pouches are her new thing. So I think you're probably pretty right about it being driven by women.
Marina Murphy 0:05:50
Which is interesting because when you think about this new cigarette transition, You know, we see the same graph shape, right? Cigarettes going down, snus going up. But that was completely driven by men. So it's like women were very slow to adopt snus from cigarettes, but they're much faster to move from snus to nicotine pouches.
Carrie Wade 0:06:09
And my other question is, do you see, I mean, I know this is kind of a limited data set from your company, but do you see this being indicative of a switch or an expansion of use? So switch, I'm talking about switch from cigarettes.
Marina Murphy 0:06:28
Yeah, a switch from cigarettes.
Carrie Wade 0:06:32
Yeah, I know that you weren't talking about that. I'm just adding flavour to it.
Marina Murphy 0:06:35
Yeah, yeah. Well, in Sweden, hardly anybody smokes anyway. The dominant product is snus, so that was the obvious one to look at.
And we had done previous research in the US, and we called it, our nickname for it was the Path to Pouch, where we looked at basically the different transitions that people make with, say, assuming they started a cigarette, how many different steps did it take them to get to a pouch? And most people took several steps.
But for the vast majority, they transitioned directly from an oral product to nicotine pouches. So it was the obvious thing was to look at snus in these countries where nicotine pouches are well established. The other thing is that we have these huge data sets because we sell direct to consumer. So we don't go via any third parties.
So that means that in addition to the numbers, we actually know who our consumers are. I mean, we didn't do it here. We're just doing a very simple, you know, what's the market share looking like? Are we selling more or less nicotine? Are nicotine pouches versus snus? And how does it change over time? But we could actually look at individuals.
And because we can look at their shopping basket in 2018, and then look at it every year and see how did they progress. So we could actually do that.
Carrie Wade 0:07:58
I think that would make David Swainer very happy.
Andrew Manson 0:07:59
Hi, Marina. You showed the Nordic data there, but you've done studies. Do I understand correctly, you've done studies in the US as well?
Marina Murphy 0:08:12
We've done studies in the U.S. as well, and we're currently repeating that study in the U.S., and we're looking at the U.K. Obviously, the U.K. is different because it doesn't have an oral tobacco tradition, but nicotine pouch sales are increasing rapidly there, so it'll be interesting to see what that looks like versus the more established markets like Scandinavia and the U.S.
,
Andrew Manson 0:08:37
But in the U.S., where their oral products are different, lower lip, it's bigger, it's a different kind of demographic, do you find transition to nicotine pouches is more from cigarette users or more from oral tobacco users in the U.S.? ?
Marina Murphy 0:08:59
Well, like I said, you see progression. And a lot of people who are using the oral tobacco in the US were smokers to begin with. So they often do it. They're smokers. Then they move to chewing tobacco. And maybe some of them ultimately end up on a nicotine pouch. And in the US, in the study we did, we also saw a difference between women and men in the US.
Again, I suppose kind of similar to here. women didn't tend to transition via chewing tobacco, much like they don't like snus very much. Unsurprisingly. Yeah, they tend to transition via vapes. So there was a gender difference there as well.
Andrew Manson 0:09:37
Okay, thank you.
Attendee 0:09:44
Hi Marina, thanks so much. We know that sales data doesn't necessarily reflect actual product use in people. Have you compared your data set to the prevalence rates in Sweden with data gathered from public health sources, etc.? ? No, we haven't actually. Maybe we should.
Marina Murphy 0:10:07
It'd be interesting to see how closely they align with the... But in a lot of the studies that we do, like I said, we have the transactional data, we can see the shopping basket, but we can also engage with the consumer. And we do do a lot of studies like that. We ask them, you know, you bought this, did you buy other things elsewhere?
Because, of course, just because you bought stuff online doesn't mean you didn't go into the shop and, you know... and buy something else. So we do those kind of things as well. But again, that's limited to, you know, by the fact that it's our own e-commerce websites and they're our consumers. So yeah, it's just a snapshot.
Attendee 0:10:48
Thank you.
Gerry Stimson 0:10:53
Yeah, similar question, really. We're trying to piece together a picture of what's going on from different sources of data. The market data are fascinating. So, too, are the prevalence data, and it's trying to work out relationships between the market data and the prevalence data. It's a question to both...
path presenter and to Marina because Marina's work shows sort of very dynamic market situation and we're understanding that a bit more in different countries now when we've looked at the introduction of safer nicotine products we and look at country case studies we've often thought of single things you know in the UK e-cigarettes driving down smoking in New Zealand similar in in Japan, ICOS, and so on.
But there's obviously clearly quite a dramatic shift in consumer patterns. And we did a similar thing recently looking at Iceland, but there the dynamics, looking both at prevalence and market data, where there the dynamics were even more complicated than what you suggested, because smoking initially was brought down by the adoption of Icelandic snuff, which is kind of a snus.
that declines as e-cigarettes come in. The smoking trajectory continues to go down. Then pouches come in and e-cigs and Icelandic stuff goes down. So looking at the very interesting market dynamic in the move from smoking to a range of different products. So that's just kind of an observation really.
The question, if I can go to PATH, is, as I understand it, you're not picking up, you're looking at kind of dual use, either smoking or other non-combustible products, because what's going on at the same time is changing in markets because there are different products coming in and going out.
So does PATH pick up different product use within those categories, not just the binary smoking versus non-smoking?
Adam Lenart 0:12:49
would you like to answer? Okay. Beth does picks it up. So I did not show it here, but I could have, or we could have studied it. So Beth looks at all kinds of brands, which flavour, which strength. So yes, it's possible to answer. And yes, you are right. I mean, consumer preferences change over time.
So it also showed that when e-cigarettes entered or became more popular, it spoke to other cigarette smokers. And if there is a new product that comes into the market, it will also speak to other cigarette smokers whose lifestyle or preference is aligned with the usage of that product. So I guess more alternative products means more smokers transitioning out.