Market crossovers are usually announced by the company that profits from them, in a press release, with the method in a footnote. This one arrived as a peer-reviewed study, which makes it more useful and, in one specific way, easier to misread. The numbers are strong. The dataset is narrower than the headline suggests. Both things belong in the piece, so both are here.
This is the market-landscape entry in the Snus Watch brands cluster. The brands themselves are compared in nicotine pouch brands compared, and the owners behind them are mapped in who owns the nicotine pouch brands.
One ground rule first. Pouches are adult products. Snus Watch is written for adult nicotine users: 18 and over in Europe and the UK, 21 and over in the US.
What exactly did the study measure?
Murphy, Henenberg and Reese, in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, analysed more than 19 million e-commerce orders for oral nicotine products placed in Sweden and Norway between January 2018 and 17 September 2025, across seven online platforms, covering over 1.7 million customers. For each country and year, they calculated volume shares from cans sold: the cans of tobacco-free nicotine pouches divided by the total cans of pouches and snus combined.
That is a clean design for the question it asks, and a bounded one. Online orders are where pouches grew up: the category was built by e-commerce in the Nordics years before it filled petrol-station shelves. A dataset drawn only from online sales will show the new category at its strongest, which is precisely why the figures are worth publishing with their frame attached rather than as unqualified national market shares.
The crossover, year by year in outline
| Market | Pouch share 2018 | Pouch share 2025 | Snus share 2018 | Snus share 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 5% | 55% | 95% | 45% |
| Norway | 22% | 56% | 78% | 44% |
Sweden is the steeper story: a market that was effectively all snus within living memory now buys more pouches than snus online. Norway started further along in the dataset, at 22 percent in 2018, and the two countries land in almost the same place. One tension travels with the Norwegian figure: this site's register records that no nicotine pouch has approval for import or sale in Norway outside medicines law, and the study does not address how its Norwegian sales sit with that position. The figures are reported here as the study published them; the legal reconciliation is an open question, not a settled one.
Inside the totals, the study's most quoted detail is the gender split. Female customers crossed over in 2022, three years before the market as a whole, and bought more pouches than snus from then on. Male customers narrowed the gap every year but still bought more snus overall in 2025. Any retailer range decision in the Nordics now runs through that split, whether the retailer says so or not.
What are the honest limits of these numbers?
Four, and they matter for how the figures should be used:
- One retailer's universe. The orders come from platforms operated by Haypp Group. The authors are employees of Haypp or its subsidiary Snusbolaget, and one declares shareholdings in Haypp and BAT. None of that invalidates order data, which is either counted correctly or not, but it means the dataset is a very large shop, not a census.
- Online only. Supermarket, convenience and petrol-station sales are outside the frame. Snus's offline base in Sweden is deep and old; national figures, when statistical agencies publish them with pouches separated from snus, will likely show a smaller pouch share than 55 percent.
- Share of cans sold, in two countries with an EU snus ban around them. Norway and Sweden are the category's home turf, the two markets where pouches had the longest run-up. The study says nothing direct about the UK, Germany or the US.
- The paper's own framing is not this site's. The authors present the crossover partly in harm-reduction terms. Snus Watch reports the sales data, takes no position on that framing, and notes that a sales trend is evidence about buying, not about health.
What does the crossover do to the shelf?
Three consequences follow from the numbers. Ranges: the growth is concentrated in the mid and high strength bands that every brand labels differently, which makes the strength chart problem harder. Ownership: a crossover market is worth buying into, which is the backdrop to KT&G and Altria buying LOOP's maker in late 2025 and Imperial buying Helwit's owner in 2026, both mapped in who owns the nicotine pouch brands. And product development: the brands gaining share in the dataset are the flavour-led, format-varied ones the brands comparison tables.
What to watch next is whether official statistics catch up: the study's authors themselves note that the test of the trend is whether national retail and survey data, which are only now separating pouches from snus, show the same shape. When those series publish, this page gets updated with them, whichever way they cut.
FAQ
Did pouches really outsell snus in Sweden in 2025?
In online oral nicotine sales, yes, on this dataset: pouches took 55 percent of cans sold against 45 percent for snus, counted across more than 19 million orders on seven platforms. National all-channel figures are a different measurement and had not published a directly comparable split when this page was checked.
Where do the 55 and 56 percent figures come from?
From Murphy, Henenberg and Reese's cross-sectional study in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, analysing e-commerce orders from Sweden and Norway between 2018 and 2025. Sweden's pouch share rose from 5 percent in 2018 to 55 percent in 2025; Norway's from 22 to 56 percent.
Who funded or produced the data?
The platforms belong to Haypp Group, and the authors are Haypp and Snusbolaget employees, declared in the paper's conflict-of-interest statement. The study is peer-reviewed and published, and its method and limits are on the record. We cite it as the largest public order dataset for these markets, with its ownership attached.
Does this mean snus is disappearing?
No. Snus still holds 45 percent of the Swedish online market in the same data, after starting at 95. The story is a changing of the guard at the top of the category, not an exit: both products remain large, and the offline picture is likely kinder to snus than the online one.
Is the same crossover happening in the US and the UK?
This study does not measure it, and this page does not borrow its numbers for other markets. Both countries show fast pouch growth in trade reporting, but neither has a snus baseline to cross over from in the Scandinavian sense, since snus was never their default product.
Sources
- Murphy MA, Henenberg D, Reese L, Cross-Sectional Study on Oral Nicotine Product Sales Trends in Scandinavia From 2018 to 2025, JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (PubMed record; more than 19 million e-commerce orders, authors' Haypp and Snusbolaget affiliations declared): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41686517/?duplicate_of=41604316
- Northerner, How Adult Nicotine Use Is Shifting in the Nordics (study summary: Sweden 5 to 55 percent, Norway 22 to 56 percent, female crossover in 2022, online-platform scope stated): https://www.northerner.com/the-northerner/forum/nicotine-in-the-nordics-how-adult-choices-continue-to-shift
- Clearing the Air, Nicotine pouches overtake snus in Scandinavia, study finds (seven platforms, more than 1.7 million customers): https://clearingtheair.eu/en/post/nicotine-pouches-overtake-snus-in-scandinavia-study-finds/
- Haypp Group, Nicotine Pouches Overtake Traditional Snus in Scandinavia (the study's own release, including the 19 million order base): https://www.haypp.com/uk/nicopedia/news/nicotine-pouches-overtake-snus