What’s really inside nicotine pouches? While these products are often treated as a single category, their composition can vary significantly. In this GFN Science Lab presentation, Lindsay Reese presents one of the largest compositional analyses of nicotine pouches to date, covering 446 fully tested products from 2025 (drawn from more than 500 products analyzed). The research explores key characteristics such as nicotine content, moisture, pH, impurities, heavy metals, and other chemical constituents, offering a detailed look at the diversity of products available across global markets.
Transcription:
GFN Science Lab 1 — Lindsay Reese
2026-06-04 · 11:30-13:00 (Europe/Warsaw) · Global Forum on Nicotine 2026
Gizelle Baker 0:00:11
Quite often when we think, like I mentioned before, pouches, we think of them as a category with just a few defining characteristics. But in our next video, we get to kind of lift up the hood and look under it to see what's actually in these products. How similar are they, or for that matter, how different are they based on the composition?
In Lindsay's research, he looked at over 400 different products to really start to understand on a broader basis, what these products are, what is the range and variability between them, and what does it mean when we're talking about things like risk, exposure, what does it mean for regulation, and ultimately, what does it mean for consumers on the other end?
So let's watch the next video.
Lindsay Reese 0:00:57
Hello, GFN Science Lab. My name is Lindsay Reese, and in this presentation, I will talk about the compositional profiling of the nicotine pouches we tested in 2025. As a disclaimer, I am an employee of Snoozeblog at AB, an affiliate of Hype Group, which is the sponsor 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 tobacco or nicotine manufacturers. Nicotine pouches have been commercially available for about 10 years, but there are only a dozen or so publications on what they actually contain. Most of these studies test 20 to 40 pouch products from a single market.
We routinely test new pouches and publish the findings on our website nicoleaks.com. Here I will touch on the main results from 2025 to provide objective data about product composition and to support transparency in a growing product category. Hype started testing products in 2020 before any country had developed technical specifications or guidelines for the category.
It was important for the company to determine if the new manufacturers being considered were producing quality products. Nikoleaks was launched in October 2021, providing a place where regulators, scientists, and even consumers could view independent third-party testing results. All testing is performed by the Eurofins Laboratory in Lidköping, Sweden.
The number of tests we perform increases every year, and 2025 was our biggest yet, focused on widening our coverage of products in markets outside of Sweden. Last year, we asked Eurofins to test 527 different products. Here, I will give you an overview of the 446 full tests from 2025. These analytical reports are already posted on EcoLeaks or will be soon.
The sample report on the right shows the 10 categories that are assessed. Carrying over the analytical report shown here in the bottom left, The testing battery corresponds to two main categories divided here by the dotted line. On the top are product characteristics that influence size, strength, delivery, and mouthfeel.
These include pouch weight, water content, nicotine content, pH, and levels of propylene glycol and glycerol, which are both humectants.
On the bottom are undesirable characteristics common in cigarette smoke and unpasteurized oral tobacco products, They include the mycotoxins aflatoxin and ocrotoxin, trace metals like cadmium, mercury, arsenic, chromium, lead, and nickel, tobacco-specific nitrosamines, microbial activity, and the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon benzoapyrine, which is a marker of combustion.
Methodology underlying this analysis was to collect all 2025 analytical reports, remove partial tests, exclude duplicates, and perform descriptive analysis of the remaining 446 reports. This slide shows the main findings. They are reported as medians due to the skewed distributions. Only products above the limit of quantification were included in the calculation.
On the top in blue are measurements related to product characteristics. Median nicotine content per pouch was 7.4 milligrams and the pH was 8.5. Moisture was calculated as a sum of water content and the two humectants, and the average was 31.3% by weight. Below in pink are the measurements that we would expect to see below quantification or at very low levels.
No products contained benzoapyrine or mycotoxins. A quarter of products had detectable microbial activity at very low levels. One product contained a detectable level of the sum of four TSNAs, and trace metals were found in some products, with nickel detectable in more than half. These values were all within acceptable levels.
I should mention that we did also include one test from 2026. To give context to where pouches sit on the risk spectrum, we purchased sonic nicotine replacement therapy from a Swedish pharmacy and asked Eurofins to run the same test battery. You can see at the top of the table that the consumer nicotine products weigh more, have a higher nicotine content, and are much moister.
With regard to the undesirable constituents, all were undetectable in the NRT and, if found in consumer products, were at low levels and within established guidelines. In conclusion, this science lab summarized HYPS 2025 testing of 446 products from 48 brands sold in six countries. These are the median values for the products tested.
It should be noted that since HYPE does not list products above 20 milligrams of nicotine per pouch, the results do not reflect the full range of products found in some markets. The testing revealed undetectable or low levels of undesirable constituents, similar to Swedish NRTs. As a next step, these data will be submitted for journal publication.
All original reports will be available on the updated release of NICOLEAKS coming later in 2026. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues at HYPE and the experts at Eurofins who make this testing possible. Thank you for your interest in our work.
Gizelle Baker 0:06:20
Thank you. Let's hand it over to Lindsay, otherwise known as Anna number three.
Lindsay Reese 0:06:26
Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you for coming. So just to give you some context to that testing, about half of the products we tested last year were on the US market and half were on the EU market.
So one of the things I want to talk about in the publication that I'm supposed to be writing is kind of dividing it up by market and looking at these types of data from you know, recently in time, because a lot of the existing publications, it would be published in 24 and they would say, we looked at these 20 products on the U S market from 2021.
I think it's important to understand like what, what are we seeing on the market now? Uh, how does it influence like what people are really using? What are the product characteristics that are helping drive people away from smoking cigarettes and helping them switch to a different product? Um, So it was a convenient sample.
It's not necessarily reflective of what's exactly on market. So for example, in the US, for one company, we did all of their portfolio. So they accounted for like 15% of the products we tested in the US. And that was a fairly moist product. I think in general, you see that the products in the US compared to the EU have lower milligram per pouch.
And they are typically much drier. But I think with the changes in the FDA that have happened this year, we might see a lot of changes in what's on the US market. So happy to take any questions. We have a question over here.
Todd Prochnau 0:08:07
Thanks. It's super interesting. So I'm Todd Prochnau from Canada. And I find it interesting you took a look at the Zonic NRT pouch in Sweden. We have it in Canada, although I think it's a different formulation. But I was curious if you've tested or would consider testing some of the conventional nicotine replacement therapies outside of the pouch.
So I'm thinking like the gum or the lozenge, for instance, because I've kind of long thought that This could be a way that we could get the nicotine pouch on a more level playing field. It's actually like, you know, because they'll say, well, you know, nickel's found in all these nicotine pouches.
But, you know, if it's also found in the gum that's been around for decades, then perhaps it's a good comparator.
Lindsay Reese 0:08:59
Agree. We only test pouches. But Anna has published on, I think you tested the gum and the laws. Anna, number one. You tested the gum and the lozenge in the BMC chemistry paper, if I'm correct.
Anna Masser 0:09:17
Yeah, and we did find nickel in the lozenge. I don't remember right now if we found it in the gum. But yeah, we did find other things in the gum. So if you would look at the number of constituents that we found, we found and we chose constituents that we considered were relevant to oral products.
But we found more in the gum compared to the two pouches we tested and the least in the lozenge.