What is a nicotine pouch?

A nicotine pouch is a small, soft sachet that sits between your top lip and gum. There's no tobacco leaf in it. You leave it in place for roughly 20 to 40 minutes while it releases nicotine and flavour, then it goes in the bin.

A Swedish idea

Swedes have kept tobacco under the lip since the 1700s. That habit is snus, and for most of its history it was loose, moist tobacco pressed into shape with the fingers. In 1977 Swedish Match borrowed the idea of the teabag and sold the first portioned snus, Tre Ankare, in small pouches. Today's pouch descends directly from it.

The tobacco came out in the 2000s. Niconovum, a small Swedish company led by the nicotine researcher Karl Olov Fagerström, made a pouch filled with plant fibre and nicotine. It registered the pouch in 2008 as a nicotine replacement medicine (Zonnic, 2mg per pouch). The snus makers soon followed. Swedish Match built ZYN, now the best-selling pouch in the world.

Norway took longer to decide what a pouch was. Tobacco-free pouches went on sale there as Epok in 2014, and in June 2018 regulators ordered them off the shelves. They were back within days, with a pinch of bleached tobacco added so the law would treat them as snus.

What's inside

Open one up and you'll find about half a gram of fill. Most of it is plant fibre, usually cellulose from eucalyptus or pine, which gives the pouch its body and carries everything else. The rest is nicotine, water and glycerine to keep it moist, a sweetener, flavour, and a little alkaline salt such as sodium carbonate. The outer layer is a thin fleece that lets saliva in and keeps the fill from escaping.

How it works

The alkaline salt matters more than you'd guess. Nicotine in a pouch is mostly stored as a salt, which keeps well in the can but doesn't pass easily through the lining of your mouth. Once saliva soaks in, the alkaline salt raises the pH and part of the nicotine changes into its "free base" form, which does.

That's why two pouches with the same strength on the can can feel quite different. Moisture and pH change how much nicotine you take in, and how quickly. Swedish Match's own figures for snus put it plainly: "The extraction of nicotine diminishes with a low moisture content, while a high pH value increases the extraction of nicotine from the pouch." A moist pouch starts working almost as soon as it's in. A drier one takes a few minutes while saliva wets the fibre.

What makes Nordic pouches different

Swedish pouches tend to be moister than American ones, so they start sooner. They also come in more shapes: mini, slim and regular are all common in Sweden, while American ranges mostly stick to mini and slim.

Sweden also has its own law for tobacco-free nicotine products, and its product rules have applied since January 2023. Any pouch sold there must:

• be made from high-purity ingredients;
• contain no caffeine, vitamins or other additives that suggest energy or health;
• list every ingredient by weight, with the nicotine per pouch;
• be registered with the Public Health Agency of Sweden before it goes on sale.

None of that makes a pouch harmless, and the same law forbids anyone selling one from suggesting otherwise. If you want the evidence, read Are nicotine pouches safe?

Reading the strength

Strength is printed in milligrams, so check what the milligrams measure. Most cans give nicotine per pouch. Some Swedish brands give it per gram of fill, which makes the number look bigger. If a can says 20mg/g and each pouch holds half a gram, each pouch carries about 10mg.

Size is the other choice. Mini is the smallest, slim is long and narrow and sits flat, and regular is the biggest. Choosing your first pouch goes through both.

KLAR and its bioceramic

Nearly every pouch is built on plant fibre. KLAR is built on ceramic. It comes from Emplicure, a bioceramics company in Uppsala co-founded by Håkan Engqvist, a materials science professor at Uppsala University, and it launched in 2024. The fill is a calcium-based ceramic KLAR calls SERATEK, full of pores far too small to see. The nicotine sits in those pores, and Emplicure sets their size to control how quickly it comes out.

KLAR says this works faster, and that its pouches deliver "a 25% stronger kick with less nicotine", based on its own 2025 study against the world's best-selling pouch. The study hasn't been published, so the figure is KLAR's own. KLAR also makes its pouches smaller and softer than standard ones. There's more in KLAR: the pouch built on ceramic.

Pouches contain nicotine, which is addictive. They're for adults who already use nicotine.