Zyn has taken the U.S. by storm.
The nicotine pouch brand’s boom came at an opportune time for parent company Philip Morris International, which faced a yearslong decline in cigarette smoking.
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized 20 Zyn products to be marketed and sold in the U.S. The FDA had allowed Zyn to be sold legally in the U.S. while the agency reviewed its premarket applications.
The FDA determined that “due to substantially lower amounts of harmful constituents than cigarettes and most smokeless tobacco products, such as moist snuff and snus, the authorized products pose lower risk of cancer and other serious health conditions than such products.”
Meghan Morean, a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine, said, “It’s good that we’re moving towards a harm reduction approach. But nicotine itself is not completely without risk.”
Zyn is manufactured by Swedish Match, which Philip Morris International acquired in a $16 billion deal in 2022.
That year, Zyn shipped 238 million cans in the U.S. Philip Morris International forecasts that the total more than doubled in 2024.
Zyn’s growth comes as the company looks to transition more to smokeless products.
“Their goal is by 2030, two-thirds of their revenue should be smoke-free,” said Goldman Sachs senior analyst Bonnie Herzog. “And ultimately they’d love it to be 100%. The beauty of this transformation is that they’re actually generating faster top line and faster profitability given the pivot to these businesses.
In July, Philip Morris International announced it would invest $600 million to build a new Zyn production facility in Aurora, Colorado. About a month later, the company announced it would invest an additional $232 million to expand production at its plant in Owensboro, Kentucky.
Watch the video to learn more about why Philip Morris International is expanding its production of Zyn in the U.S. market.
Correction: The accompanying video has been revised to indicate that Philip Morris International spun off from Altria Group in March 2008. A previous version of the video misstated the date.
