Traditional Oral
Product Development
What are traditional oral products?
Oral tobacco products are meant to be placed in the mouth and chewed, sucked, or dissolved. These products require no heat or combustion. Traditional oral products (also known as smokeless tobacco products) include portioned snus, loose moist, and portioned moist, among others.
Our Work with Traditional Oral Products
Oral tobacco products are among the oldest in the world. We continue to build methods to better understand and characterize oral tobacco products including how these products are used by adult tobacco consumers. While much of our focus is on modern oral products, we continue to develop methods for reducing constituent variability in the traditional oral product category.
Snus and the Swedish experience
The Swedish experience with snus is a useful case study of tobacco harm reduction with epidemiological data that is relevant to our increasingly popular oral products.
Snus is a traditional oral tobacco product that is placed between the lip and gums and held in the mouth for around 30 minutes, during which time it slowly releases nicotine*; nothing is inhaled. It has been available in Sweden for 200 years, and, although popularity waned when cigarettes became available, it enjoyed a resurgence there in the 1970s. Although Sweden now has the highest consumption of smokeless tobacco per capita in the world, Swedish men have Europe’s lowest death rate attributable to tobacco and the lowest incidence of lung cancer and other tobacco-related diseases of nearly every country in the developed world. For example, in 2020, age-standardized lung cancer incidence for men was estimated to be 17.2 per 100,000 in Sweden compared to 33.1 per 100,000 in the US.1
1 International Agency for Research into Cancer. Cancer Today. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxrep.2021.02.014.
* Nicotine in tobacco products is addictive. No tobacco product has been shown to be safe or risk free.