Smokeless Tobacco: Perfect Alternative to Outwit Anti-Smoking Laws

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Chewing tobacco and Swedish snus are going pretty much under the radar in a world awash with combustible tobacco products, yet they are fantastic alternatives to circumvent smoking restrictions.

By Thomas Schmid

It was the year 1805 and Napoleon Bonaparte was just about to begin laying waste to much of Europe. In the Danish capital of Copenhagen, a young entrepreneur named Peter Abraham Bock paid a visit to the offices of daily newspaper Kiøbenhavnske Tidender. He took out an advertisement in order to promote the A/S Hermann Krüger’s Eftf company, in which he was a partner. “We regard this as the official birth date of the Oliver Twist brand,” says Thomas Nellemose, area sales manager of the company which today is known as House of Oliver Twist A/S.

Complementing Swedish Match portfolio

Over the ensuing centuries, the company underwent several ownership changes, most recently in April 2018 when it was bought by Swedish Match AB. However, Oliver Twist, the brand, stood the test of time, being today regarded as one of the oldest (and most iconic) chewing tobacco brands still around. At the time of the buy-out, Swedish Match c.e.o., Lars Dahlgren, had said, “Oliver Twist is a good complement to our smokeless portfolio and will provide increased depth to our chewing tobacco offerings, especially in Europe.” Dahlgren’s statement very closely reflects Nellemose’s own assessment. “I believe [the takeover] will benefit Oliver Twist in the future, as having become part of Swedish Match affords us additional opportunities and resources not only to reach out to existing but also to explore new markets,” he says.

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A helping hand to improve ailing sales

A helping hand from a company with a global footprint like Swedish Match is perhaps exactly what Oliver Twist needed. Like practically all chewing tobacco brands, sales of the Danish product have languished for decades, particularly in Western Europe (except for the Nordic countries where chewing tobacco has always remained popular).

“While we have a strong tradition of chewing tobacco in Scandinavia, Oliver Twist is very much a niche product elsewhere in Europe and beyond,” confirms Nellemose. But, this wasn’t always the case. Until the early decades of the 20th century, the use of chewing tobacco was relatively widespread, even among central and southern Europeans. It eventually decreased in favor of combustible tobacco products, perhaps because of a lot of negative – yet unjustified - publicity. Essentially, chewing tobacco was discredited as “unsophisticated” and associated with the lower income classes.

A little renaissance in the making?

It has only been in recent years that chewing tobacco has lost some of that stigma and has actually been experiencing kind of a small and modest renaissance. With anti-smoking laws becoming increasingly restrictive pretty much everywhere in the world, chewing tobacco has regained some reputation as an ideal tobacco alternative. Frequent air travelers appreciate it to comfortably keep their nicotine cravings in check during intercontinental flights or while being stuck for hours on end in a transit lounge. It also comes in extremely handy in prolonged business meetings or in a smoke-free office. Visits to the neighborhood pub are no longer dulled because you have to leave your friends behind at the table every 15 minutes in order to join a miserable posse of fellow smokers gathered outside in a dark and damp side alley.

Nellemose sums it up perfectly, in this case for his own brand:  “Oliver Twist tobacco bits can be used discreetly anytime and anywhere; they don’t bother anyone, because they are a smokeless product and don’t cause users to break anti-smoking laws.”

Less harmful than regular tobacco products

Nellemose also claims that Oliver Twist – and chewing tobacco at large - is not as harmful as combustible products, as no dangerous chemicals are created that find their way into a smoker’s lungs. Instead, the tobacco’s aroma and nicotine are absorbed through the oral cavity’s mucous membranes.

“Smokeless tobacco is going to play a larger part in everyday life in the future,” he predicts, “partly because of stricter legislation [regarding combustibles] but also because both active and passive smokers nowadays generally put greater focus on health and harm reduction.” The product also can serve as an impressively effective aid in quitting smoking. “I have over the years received a lot of positive feedback from smokers who have either completely stopped smoking or who have greatly reduced their cigarette consumption due to Oliver Twist tobacco bits,” Nellemose asserts.

A very traditional manufacturing process

The production process of Oliver Twist hasn’t marginally changed since the early 1800s. In fact, a large part of it is still carried out manually by trained workers. The raw material is high-quality cured whole-leaf tobacco, which is de-stemmed at the Oliver Twist factory. The leaf halves are then – one by one – laterally rolled by hand into long strands that should turn out as compact as possible. “This is done in what we call the ‘spinning room’,” explains Nellemose.

The readily spun strands are cut into one-centimeter long pieces and smothered with a syrupy flavor mix in the “saucery,” a process commonly referred to as “casing” in modern tobacco industry lingo. “Our expert ‘sauce master’ holds a position of great trust in the company,” Nellemose points out. “After all, it is his responsibility to guard our utmost production secrets, namely the exact recipes of our different flavorings.”

The finished Oliver Twist tobacco bits are vacuum packed in portions of seven grams (representing approximately 30 bits each) and placed in small re-sealable plastic boxes. The company’s traditional bestseller remains the “Original” recipe resplendent with smoky spice notes and a pronounced licorice flavor. “It is this characteristic smoky aroma that I think goes down particularly well with most smokers,” Nellemose observes.

Oliver Twist has in the meantime also expanded its product portfolio to other flavors like “Tropical” and “Arctic” (see table), a process that is ongoing. “For example, our latest flavor will be launched in early 2019 and named ‘Frosted.’ It will feature a spearmint aroma, which has been requested by many of our customers,” Nellemose discloses.

Virtually no sales in Asia

Outside of Scandinavia, where Oliver Twist is considered the market leader in the chewing tobacco segment, Nellemose says that the EU and North America are currently its two main markets. But, there are no sales in Asia yet, although according to Nellemose Swedish Match has “recently started introducing Oliver Twist to different distribution partners [in various Asian countries] to investigate whether there might be market potential.”

Perhaps unknown to Nellemose, some Asian countries interestingly already have a strong chewing tobacco tradition. “Khaina,” for example, describes a particular form of chewing tobacco very popular in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. “Khaina” is also well loved in other regional countries where communities of South Asians have settled.

The snus phenomenon of Scandinavia

Leaving chewing tobacco aside for now, the second important product category that immediately springs to mind when the topic “smokeless tobacco” is mentioned is Swedish snus, of course. These tiny pouches filled with finely ground and flavored tobacco are extremely popular in Sweden and Norway. “Those two countries have approximately the same proportion of tobacco users as the EU average, about 26%. But only 7% of the tobacco product consumers in Sweden actually smoke. The rest primarily enjoy snus,” Lars Hansson, sales manager at one of Scandinavia’s most prominent snus manufacturers, Gotlandssnus AB, elaborates on the tremendous popularity of the product in northern Europe.

“Healthier” than combustibles …

Just like Nellemose had mentioned with regards to chewing tobacco, Hansson likewise extolls the advantages of snus. “Apart from the purely aesthetic aspects that snus is completely odorless and doesn’t irk the close environment, it is discreet and can be enjoyed even where actual smoking is forbidden,” he says. “Furthermore, science is very clear about it that snus consumers can avoid many of the potential health risks associated with smoking.” He cites a study by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute published in 2018, which concluded that the risk for developing pancreatic cancer is pretty much the same among snus users and among complete non-smokers (while it is on the other hand considerably higher for users of combustibles.)

The Karolinska study only confirmed the findings of a scientific evaluation by the European Union carried out almost twenty years earlier, namely that snus consumption indeed does not increase the risk for oral or pancreatic cancer. As a direct result of that EU evaluation, cancer warnings were subsequently phased out on snus packaging – although packs today still carry other health warnings.

… But not entirely risk-free

Yet snus is of course not completely risk-free. “It contains nicotine, which can pose a danger to pregnant women and their unborn child, thus must be avoided by mothers-to-be,” Hansson admits, adding the rhetorical question, “But the same would certainly hold true for smoking, right?” But, there is more to it: Snus should be handled carefully by new users and that is down to the particular manufacturing process inherent to the product.

Snus is primarily very finely ground, almost powdery tobacco. It thus often contains a higher nicotine concentration per gram than what is normally present in an equivalent amount of chewing tobacco. Additionally, the grinding increases the physical surface of the product many times over. Hence, the oral cavity’s mucous membranes absorb aromas and nicotine released by snus much more rapidly than what would be typical for chewing tobacco. This brings about an almost instantaneous nicotine rush that in unaccustomed newbies may cause dizziness and lightheadedness, in severe cases even hypertonia or heart palpitations.

Commercial sales banned, individual use permitted

The import, distribution, wholesale, and retail of Swedish snus in commercial quantities is currently banned in practically all EU countries except Norway and Sweden. However, private importation, possession, and actual use by adults of legal age is not restricted. Accordingly, Hansson says that while his company’s primary markets are the two Nordic countries as well as the US (where snus likewise can be sold freely), the numbers of individual users in EU countries such as Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK has been slowly increasing over the past few years, too.

But, Hansson adds that “although [other] smokeless tobacco products are not unusual to find in most countries, Swedish snus still remains a rare category outside the EU and US.” In Asia, snus is almost entirely restricted to the Swedish resident communities, who bring back small quantities from their vacations or order them online. Gotlandssnus has no official presence in Asia. As for the rest of the world, “There have been countries where we previously sold our products but eventually had to withdraw because of poor turnover or because of changes in the law.”