It was a Friday night in Lower Manhattan, and young crowds gathered around bistro tables and spilling onto sidewalks were partaking in an array of substances.
They tossed back Negronis, stepped out for cigarettes, pulled on vapes and furtively removed small hockey-puck-shaped tins from their pockets. Some were hidden under phones, while others were planted between cocktails and beers — an implicit invitation to help yourself.
A patron who gave his name only as Alex was a bit sheepish about the tin at his table outside Forgtmenot, a bar on Division Street where he was hanging out with a few friends. It was a green and white container of spearmint Zyn, the nicotine product he said he had been using for a couple of years after trying to kick a vaping habit.
He packed one of the pillow-shaped sachets under his bottom lip and continued chatting as another round of drinks arrived.
As some stimulant seekers have flitted from cigarettes to the candy-colored menagerie of vapes (and back to cigarettes again), they have picked up Zyn, a brand of nicotine pouches produced by Swedish Match, a subsidiary of Philip Morris International that last year sold Americans about 350 million cans of the product.
The packets, which do not contain tobacco, are frequently discussed as a potential smoking-cessation tool, though some Zyn users were never regular cigarette smokers or vape users to begin with. Some say they have gotten hooked on the nicotine buzz delivered by Zyn, which comes in flavors that read like conference room tea offerings: wintergreen, cinnamon, chill. A single pouch is intended to last around 30 minutes.
“It got to the point where I was sleeping with a Zyn under my lip,” said Jim McHugh, 36, who works in financial services in Pennsylvania.
Men seem to be emerging as the most vocal and visible customers of Zyn. The product sits in a cultural nexus of frat life, hard partying and a dubious wellness space populated by figures like Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan, who has made misleading statements about the product’s supposed health benefits. (The long-term effects of Zyn are not clear, but nicotine can raise blood pressure and spike a user’s heart rate, and at least some doctors are concerned about addiction to nicotine pouches.)
Branding Modern Masculinity
In internet parlance — and the internet is where Zyn users seem to spend much of their time — the nicotine product may not have invented a totally “new type of guy,” but it did seem to give some guys a new way to define themselves.
“Zyns fall somewhere in between cigarettes and vapes,” said Larry Schlossman, the co-host of the men’s wear podcast “Throwing Fits.”
He said Zyn hit a sweet spot for many media and creative types, who want a discreet energy boost without the smoker’s cough. “It’s not as chic and classic as smoking,” Mr. Schlossman, 37, added. “But it’s nowhere near as corny and lame as vaping.”
From the Marlboro Man to the “vape guy,” men have for decades made a statement about their masculinity in part with their tobacco or nicotine product of choice.
“If Zyn is being marketed or used by consumers as a cultural symbol, this is nothing new for tobacco products,” said Meghan Moran, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies tobacco advertising.
Something that is new, however, is the role that social media has played in Zyn’s rise. Some teenagers say they first learned of the product on TikTok, where a coterie of aspiring influencers has gone viral with videos featuring Zyn.
Creators have made Zyn thrones, decorated their dorm rooms with Zyn lights and built towers out of hundreds of empty tins. They also use Zyn-specific slang: A sachet can be an “upper decky lip pillow” or simply an “upper decky,” terms the social media influencer Max VanderAarde, who goes by Cheddy, helped popularize.
These posters do all of this legwork for free, as Philip Morris says it does not use social media influencers — or “Zynfluencers,” as they’re known — and rejects requests for partnerships.
“While we routinely ask social platforms to take down inappropriate user-generated content, Swedish Match has no control over the user-generated content on those platforms,” a spokesman for Philip Morris wrote in an email.
Max Read, a journalist who covers the intersection of internet culture and politics, says it is something of a symbiotic relationship.
It’s “free internet marketing” for the product, he said, and a boost for the influencers who make the content: “The payment you’re getting is people Googling Zyn and your video coming up on TikTok or YouTube.”
Zyn’s cultural influence may go beyond the product itself. In a wide-ranging essay in June, Mr. Read coined a neologism to describe an online niche of bro-y, internet-addled young men: the Zynternet, a place where men in their 20s and 30s post about subjects like golf, sports gambling and their favorite podcasters.
Zyn may be speaking to an “imperiled masculinity,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, who has helped chief executives whose businesses get tangled up in politics. “It’s this failure by a lot of men in getting their lives on track that is leading them to products that give them an identity and a definition.”
Into the Culture Wars
Until recently, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was among the biggest Zynfluencers, touting the product as a “powerful work enhancer, and also a male enhancer” (a claim denied by Phillip Morris). Last December, he laughed with glee when the Nelk Boys, the YouTube pranksters turned right-wing media crew, gave him a spearmint Zyn can the size of a monster truck tire.
But he has since turned on Zyn, claiming that employees at Philip Morris had donated to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. Pledging to start his own brand of nicotine pouches, Alp, Mr. Carlson now says Zyn is “not a brand for men.”
Still, conservative figures have embraced Zyn as useful grist for the mill in the culture wars, turning the nicotine pouches into Chiclet-size symbols of freedom.
“This is a short lesson in how the internet works,” Mr. Read said. “When a product gets even the slightest hint of political affiliation, the polarization process happens immediately and quickly self-reinforces.”
After Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, asked the Food and Drug Administration in January to take a closer look at Zyn’s practices, warning that the pouches posed a danger to teenagers, the response from Republicans was swift.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called for a “Zynsurrection” on X, and Richard Hudson, a congressman from North Carolina, posted a photo of himself holding up a Zyn can and daring Mr. Schumer to “come and take it!”
As gender has become a defining issue in the 2024 presidential election, former President Donald J. Trump has also embraced Zyn as a potentially politically expedient way to attract the attention of young male voters.
Last month, Mr. Trump started running campaign ads targeting men under 35 in battleground states featuring the YouTuber Jake Paul, stoking fears about potential Zyn restrictions.
Far more anodyne consumer brands have gotten caught up in partisan politics, including Goya, Starbucks and Bud Light.
“It’s an indication of just how random and postmodern the signifiers that come to represent right-wing masculinity are,” said Sam Adler-Bell, a writer and co-host of “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast that analyzes the conservative movement from a left perspective. “It’s all cobbled together from little pieces of cultural ephemera.”
A New Angle for Big Tobacco
Zyn users are not universally plugged into Mr. Read’s Zynternet, nor do they all view popping a pouch as a political statement.
“I think the reason it took off in the restaurant industry is that it’s clean and nonchalant — like, you don’t have to go out on a smoke break,” said Anthony Iammatteo, a 29-year-old bartender and manager at a restaurant in Dewey Beach, Del. He said he was an intermittent social smoker for many years before switching to the nicotine pouches two years ago.
He said he treats Zyn the way he once treated cigarettes.
“It’s just a pick-me-up after dinner, or just kind of casually getting drinks with friends and whatnot,” he said. “It takes the edge off, and gives you that second wind.”
Jack Spitler said he started using the product after he came home from a military deployment in Norway and had trouble finding snus, a smokeless tobacco product popular in Scandinavia, in American stores. Eventually a friend in Jacksonville, Fla., where he now works as a firefighter, handed him a familiar-looking sachet.
“It used to be, ‘Yo, can I get a pinch of dip from you?’ Now it’s like, ‘Let me get a Zyn pouch,’” Mr. Spitler, 27, said.
For an industry forced to contemplate its growing obsolescence as tobacco use declines, Zyn represents a new strategy.
Cigarette smoking rates in the United States have declined steadily over the last 40 years, dropping to 12 percent in 2023 from 30 percent in 1987. Some of those smokers had switched to vaping, which boomed in the late 2010s, particularly among young people. But teen e-cigarette use has since declined to about a third of the peak levels in 2019.
Tobacco-free nicotine pouches like Zyn have compensated for some of that customer attrition. But the intense scrutiny on the products mean they still face an uncertain fate.
In the spring, the Food and Drug Administration sent warning letters to brick-and-mortar retailers for selling Zyn to underage customers. A few months later, Philip Morris halted online sales of Zyn after the attorney general in Washington, D.C., issued a subpoena accusing the company of violating a ban on flavored nicotine, spurring a nationwide shortage.
Philip Morris is nonetheless bullish on the product: In August, the company announced plans to build a $600 million facility in Colorado to manufacture Zyn.
‘Quitting Was Extremely Difficult’
Others have taken notice of Zyn’s rising fortunes. Max Cunningham, a former marketing consultant to Imperial Tobacco, started his own nicotine pouch company, Sesh, in 2020.
“The product category is growing so quickly, and because retailers are seeing the opportunity, it gives us a window where we can get on the shelf,” said Mr. Cunningham, 36. Tins of Sesh nicotine pouches are roughly the same size and shape as Zyn’s, but are designed to appeal to millennial eyeballs. The Sesh website is awash in pastels, as if for a direct-to-consumer frying pan or mattress brand.
Like many others who preach the virtues of Zyn, Mr. Cunningham said he viewed the tobacco-free nicotine products as part of smoking-cessation initiatives, pointing to the minuscule smoking rates in Sweden as a possible “blueprint” for North American consumers.
But for some, that would mean trading one addiction for another.
“Needless to say, quitting was extremely difficult,” said Mr. McHugh, 36, the finance worker from Pennsylvania, who mentioned headaches, difficulty sleeping and jaw clenching.
He said Zyn use was rampant in his industry, and he recently started a Reddit community to help others through the quitting process.
Not everyone is looking to quit just yet. At a crowded bar on Delancey Street last week, four 20-something men in fleece vests each had a tin of Zyn on hand.
But with Zyn so closely tied to the whims of the internet, some say there’s a chance it could one day soon go the way of the Juul — not totally extinct, but not terribly cool, either.
“We’ve sold a lot of Zyn the last couple of years,” said Ali Bin Abedat, owner of Half Moon, a smoke shop in the East Village. “But the trends always come and go.”
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