Confused about Nicotine Pouches strengths?...

We get many questions around product strength, particularly comparing one brand of nicotine pouches to another.

“What is a strong nicotine pouch?”
“What would you say is a mild or light nicotine pouch?”
“Can I compare dots across brands to get an idea of strength?”
“Can I count on the nicotine pouches containing the same amount of nicotine?”

Unfortunately, the short answer is that it is challenging to compare strengths across the many different brands of nicotine pouches that are available in the market. While confusing and potentially irritating, it's not too surprising. Every new product category takes some time to develop a common language and definitions for the various products.

We have devised a 'Strength Calculator' that allows you to compare all the brands of nicotine pouches that we sell on our site against each other.  It is also included within each product page.

As you're able to see above, it is driven by the amount of nicotine each pouch contains, allowing you to compare different nicotine pouches on an 'apples to apples basis'.

Some examples below ...

Nordic Spirit uses dots to distinguish the strength of their nicotine pouches. Their system was based on each dot representing 3mg of nicotine. So, a nicotine pouch with 3 dots will contain 9mg of nicotine. If you understood this system, it's easy to use as a strength reference. But to add to your confusion, they've added language (descriptors) such as 'Regular' and 'Strong' (to their 2 respectively 3 dot products). So, they now classify their 9mg product as strong and their 6mg product as regular. 

Zyn on the other hand, uses numbers from 1 to 4 to designate their nicotine pouch strength. This is almost the same as a 4-dot system, and one could be fooled into thinking that we can (almost) compare their products to Nordic Spirit. But that's not the case!

Instead,Zyn has its own scale where a '1' pouch will contain 1.5mg of nicotine, a '2' pouch will contain 3.0mg of nicotine, and a '4' pouch will contain 6.0mg (they don't currently sell a '3' pouch in the UK but based on their math we'd guess it would contain 4.5mg of nicotine). 

They've also added product descriptors: ' Mellow' for the 1.5mg nicotine pouches, 'Regular' for the 3.0mg nicotine pouches (half the nicotine per pouch of Nordic Spirit's 'Regular'!!) and 'Strong' for their 6.0mg nicotine pouches.

With this simple example, it should be obvious why looking at the dots, numbers, or descriptors of different brands of nicotine pouches isn't going to help you compare them.

What they all do have in common is that they contain nicotine, so an easy system would simply be to declare how many mg of nicotine each pouch contains in big, bold numbers on their cans. This would allow consumers to instantly compare the strength of one brand of nicotine pouches to another.

We hope this is the direction that the category will evolve towards to more easily compare products against each other.

Happy comparing, and do let us know if you have any questions.