There is no common strength scale, and the number on the tin is not comparable between brands. Some brands print milligrams per pouch, some print a bare milligram figure and never say per what, and some print dots out of six or words like “Intense”. Two tins both labelled 11 mg can hold very different amounts of nicotine — and independent laboratories have found several brands off their own label by more than half.
This article does one thing: sets out what each brand actually prints on its own packaging and website, what regulators require, and what happens when somebody measures the contents. Every milligram figure below comes from a manufacturer’s own site, a government instrument or laboratory, or a peer-reviewed paper. Where a brand publishes nothing, I say so rather than borrowing a number from a shop, because a retailer’s product page is not a source for what is in the tin.
Three different things a number on a tin can mean
Before any comparison is possible you have to know what the number is measuring. There are three possibilities in circulation.
Milligrams per pouch. The useful one. It tells you how much nicotine is in the thing you are putting in your lip.
Milligrams per gram. A concentration. It tells you nothing on its own, because pouch masses vary enormously. Germany’s federal risk assessment institute found a median pouch weight of 0.6 g, and the ranges it cites run from 0.25 g to 0.8 g in Dutch sampling and 0.33 g to 1.13 g in a Northern European and US study. A 0.25 g pouch and a 1.13 g pouch at the same mg/g differ four and a half fold in what they actually contain. Our mg per pouch vs mg per gram guide works through the arithmetic.
A marketing tier. A word, a dot count, or a level out of six. These are not measurements at all, and the German assessment found they do not track the chemistry reliably — more on that below.
The problem is not that these three exist. It is that a tin often does not tell you which one you are looking at.
What each brand actually publishes
I went to every manufacturer site I could reach and recorded the scheme as the brand itself states it. The single most striking finding is in the right-hand column: exactly three brands say, in their own words, that their figure is per pouch. Not one brand states a per-gram figure on its own site.
| Brand | Scheme it uses | Levels published | Says what the mg is per? |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZYN (US) | Bare mg | 3, 6 mg; ZYN Ultra 9, 11 mg | No — no basis stated anywhere |
| ZYN (Poland) | Bare mg, “Poziom nikotyny” | Mini 1.5, 3, 6 mg; Regular 11, 13.5 mg | No |
| on! / on! PLUS | Bare mg | 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12 mg; on! PLUS “two nicotine levels (6 mg and 9 mg)” per FDA’s review | No |
| VELO (Sweden) | Level out of 6 plus mg | 6, 8, 10, 12.5, 14 mg; e.g. “Styrka: 5/6, nikotin: 14 mg/påse” | Yes — mg/påse, per pouch |
| VELO (UK) | mg plus three word tiers | 4, 6, 10, 14, 17 mg; Mellow 4–6, Original 8–11, Intense 14–17 | No |
| Nordic Spirit | Dots out of 6 plus word tier plus mg | 1–2 dots new user, 3–4 moderate, 6 experienced; “X-Strong 11mg/pouch” | Yes — per pouch |
| FRE | Bare mg, explained in the FAQ | 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 mg | Yes — “the amount of nicotine per pouch” |
| ALP | Bare mg | 3, 6, 9, 12 mg | No |
| Rogue | Bare mg | 3, 6 mg | No |
| Pablo | Bare mg | 3, 6, 9, 13, 20, 24 mg | No |
| General snus | Single figure in brackets | 8 mg across the US range — no tiers at all | No |
| LOOP | Nothing published | Site refers to “a large variety of flavours and strengths” with no figures | — |
| Skruf | Nothing published | “i olika format och styrkor” — different formats and strengths | — |
| Siberia / White Fox / HIT | Nothing published | Only a relative claim: strength “up to 5 times higher than other conventional snus brands” | — |
| Klint, G.3 / G.4 | No manufacturer site found | — | — |
Read down that table and the category’s problem is plain. Six brands print a number without saying what it measures. Four brands publish no number at all. Three brands run a scale — dots, levels, words — on top of a milligram figure, and in Nordic Spirit’s case all three at once. And a 200-year-old snus brand prints one figure, 8 mg, across its entire American range, while pouch brands publish five tiers each.
The ZYN case, which makes the point better than any argument
ZYN runs separate sites per market. On the US site, the range is 3 mg and 6 mg, with ZYN Ultra at “9 MG AND 11 MG STRENGTHS” — 11 mg is the top of the range. On the Polish site, 11 mg is the standard product: “Poziom nikotyny: 11 mg oraz 13,5 mg”, with a Mini line at 1.5, 3 and 6 mg.
Neither site says what the 11 is per. I asked both pages directly for any sentence containing “per pouch” and there is none. So the same brand’s number 11 sits at the top of one market’s ladder and in the middle of another’s, and the customer has no published basis on which to reconcile them. I am not going to assert that the European figures are per gram, because ZYN does not say that anywhere I could find.
Regulators cannot agree on the unit either
You might expect the law to fix this. It does the opposite: the countries that legislate have chosen different units, so the same pouch is described two ways depending on the border.
| Jurisdiction | Instrument | Limit | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden | Lag 2022:1257 / Förordning 2022:1263 | No maximum at all — but the pack must state content and the per-dose distribution | Per dose, for labelling |
| Denmark | BEK nr 249 of 4 March 2025, in force 1 July 2025 | 9.0 mg | Per pouch |
| Finland | Tobacco Act amendment, in force 1 August 2025 | 16.6 mg | Per gram of product |
| Poland | Act of 21 May 2025, Dz.U. 2025 poz. 799 | 20 mg/g | Per gram |
| Netherlands | Warenwet policy rule 2022, superseded by a total ban on 1 January 2025 | 0.035 mg, then prohibition | Per pouch |
| Norway | Tobacco Control Act | Prohibited outright | — |
| European Union | Directive 2014/40/EU | No cap for tobacco-free oral nicotine (only 20 mg/ml for e-liquids) | — |
Denmark and Finland are the pair worth staring at. Denmark’s rule reads “Nikotinposer må maksimalt indeholde 9,0 mg nikotin pr. pose” — a maximum of 9.0 mg per pouch. Finland’s is per gram, and the Finnish health ministry did the conversion itself for the public: at 16.6 mg/g, “0,5 gramman painoisessa nikotiinipussissa nikotiinia voi olla enintään 8,3 milligrammaa ja yhden gramman pussissa 16,6 milligrammaa”, and in “melko tyypillisessä 0,7 gramman pussissa” — a fairly typical 0.7 g pouch — just under 12 mg. Two neighbouring EU states, two incompatible units, and a product that is lawful in one and unlawful in the other at the same printed strength.
The Swedish position is the one that surprises people. Sweden is the largest pouch market in the world and has no statutory nicotine ceiling for tobacco-free nicotine products. What it does have is a labelling requirement — Förordning 2022:1263 requires “uppgift om innehåll av nikotin i produkten och fördelning per dos”, the nicotine content and its distribution per dose, a rule the public health agency restates on its own labelling page. A cap was proposed in a 2024 government inquiry and has not been enacted.
And there is a genuine irony in the EU framework. Under Article 13(1)(a) of the Tobacco Products Directive, a cigarette pack may not carry information about its nicotine content. A tobacco-free pouch sits outside that Directive entirely — so the product the law says nothing about is the one free to print whatever strength claim it likes.
What the labels are worth when somebody measures
This is where the category’s credibility is decided, and the published record is mixed rather than damning.
The most useful single study is Page and colleagues at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, which measured named products against their labels. Their headline is reassuring — “For most ONPs, measured nicotine content was consistent with values provided on packages (within 20%)” — and the exceptions are not:
- “Nicotine in ONPs ranged from 1.4 ± 0.4 mg/pouch (VELO 4 mg in cans) to 16.3 ± 0.7 mg/pouch (FRĒ 15 mg).”
- “VELO nicotine pouches available in 4 and 7-mg cans contained, on average, >60% less nicotine than labeled (1.4 ± 0.4 and 2.1 ± 0.9 mg/pouch, respectively).”
- “White Fox 12 mg contained nearly 40% less nicotine (7.8 ± 0.8 mg/pouch) than labeled.”
- Bull Dog ran the other way, measuring about 20% more than claimed.
The funding statement for that paper was not visible on the publisher’s page and I could not retrieve it, so I am reporting the authors’ institution rather than claiming independence.
A German study with an unambiguous public funder — the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, grant BfR-CPS-08-60-0102-02.P606, with the authors declaring no commercial relationships — measured three pouches and found all three under label: “Analyzed nicotine contents were 4.8 ± 0.4 mg, 16.3 ± 3.1 mg, and 27.1 ± 0.2 mg for the nicotine pouches declared with 6, 20, and 30 mg, respectively.” That is roughly 20%, 19% and 10% below the printed figure.
Then there is the most interesting document of the lot, because it is not a study but a regulator reading a manufacturer’s own submission. In FDA’s Technical Project Lead review of the ZYN applications, under manufacturing, the agency records:
“However, in a nicotine PK study submitted by the applicant (SM 18-01), product characterization data of the new products used in the study revealed that nicotine quantity in half of the samples of the new products was lower than the target quantity of nicotine (approximately 4.5 mg rather than the 6.0 mg target specification).”
Half the samples of a 6 mg product at about 4.5 mg, in the applicant’s own data, in the authorised category leader. And in the same review, on the method used to measure release: “The chemistry consult concluded that it is unclear whether the nicotine dissolution method used by the applicant can precisely measure nicotine release from the new products.”
Official German state laboratory sampling gives the spread across a shelf: CVUA Sigmaringen tested 27 samples in 2022 and determined nicotine contents of “6,6 – 19,0 mg/Beutel” — 6.6 to 19.0 mg per pouch. Germany’s federal assessment found a median of 9.48 mg per pouch, a minimum of 1.79 mg and a maximum of 47.5 mg per pouch. A category whose top product holds twenty-six times its bottom product is not one where a five-tier word scale is going to do much work.
The number nobody prints: pH and free-base nicotine
Even a correct milligram figure leaves out the variable that determines how much of the nicotine is absorbable. Nicotine crosses the oral mucosa in its unprotonated, free-base form, and the fraction that is free-base depends on pH.
A CDC laboratory study of 37 pouch brands from six manufacturers found total nicotine of “1.29 to 6.11 mg/pouch”, alkalinity of “pH 6.86–10.1”, and — the figure that matters — “% free nicotine (7.7%–99.2%)”, giving free nicotine from “0.166 to 6.07 mg/pouch”.
Sit with that range. Two products with near-identical total nicotine can differ roughly thirteen-fold in the proportion that is available for absorption. No strength label anywhere in the category captures it, no regulator requires it to be disclosed, and it is not on a single tin I am aware of. A separate BfR-authored study found pH values “ranged from 5.5 to 10.5 with a median pH value of 8.8”.
Content is not dose, and the relationship is not even orderly
A labelled milligram is what is in the pouch, not what reaches you. The German clinical study measured extraction from the same three products and found: 38% from the 6 mg pouch, 24% from the 20 mg pouch, 52% from the 30 mg pouch.
That is not a rising line. The 20 mg pouch delivered the smallest fraction of what it contained. Whatever governs extraction — pH, fleece, filler, moisture, how long it is kept in — it is not the labelled strength, which is the strongest available argument against reading a tin’s number as a dose. Peak plasma concentrations in the same study were 2.8, 7.1 and 29.4 ng/ml respectively, against 15.2 ng/ml for a tobacco cigarette; the 30 mg pouch roughly doubled the cigarette.
An independently funded meta-analysis — funding stated as “None”, authors declaring no competing interests — puts the lower end in perspective: 4 mg pouches showed “a peak nicotine concentration of 69.15% (95% CI 58.55%–79.76%) compared with cigarettes” and delivered “91.73% (95% CI 85.03%–98.42%) of cigarette total nicotine exposure”. A 4 mg pouch, which every brand’s own scale calls low strength, reaching about nine-tenths of a cigarette’s total nicotine exposure is the finding that most undercuts the vocabulary.
One honest caveat about that whole literature, from the meta-analysis itself: most of the included studies were funded by the tobacco industry, with two independently funded studies reporting similar findings. Almost everything known about pouch pharmacokinetics comes from the companies selling them, and that is part of the result.
Regulators have noticed the vocabulary
Germany’s assessment is the most detailed critique in print, and it is worth quoting at length because it describes exactly the problem this article started with:
“Nicotine content, expressed as mg per pouch or per g, was declared clearly on only about a third of the nicotine pouches examined. Instead, most products described the nicotine strength, using either a scale (such as a strength of ‘3 out of 5’) for which no further details were given or figurative language to define the nicotine strength (examples being ‘easy’, ‘medium’, ‘strong’, ‘extra strong’, ‘ultra’, ‘extreme’, ‘danger strong’ or ‘brutal’).”
“One reason could be that some manufacturers meant the nicotine content per pouch and others per gram. However, this fact is not apparent to the consumer. Switching between products from different manufacturers can result in nicotine content per pouch doubling even though the nicotine strength of these products is described using the same terms.”
It also checked whether the words track the chemistry, and found they broadly do not: products described as light had “a slightly lower nicotine content” than average-strength ones, but “for products whose nicotine strength was described within the range ‘medium’ to ‘extra strong’, there was a lot of overlap, rendering a clear differentiation difficult.”
The World Health Organization made the same complaint in May 2026, naming the tier structure: some products “are being sold in multiple strength tiers marketed as ‘beginners’, ‘advanced’ and ‘experts’ with nicotine amounts labelled at up to 150 mg”, and among its recommended measures is “caps on the amount of nicotine allowed”.
There is a historical echo here that should not be missed. The EU banned “low-tar”, “light”, “ultra-light” and “mild” from cigarette packs in 2014, on the ground that they created a false impression of relative harm. The pouch category then rebuilt very nearly the same vocabulary — easy, medium, strong, extra strong — on a product the Directive does not reach.
How to read a tin, given all of that
Four rules that follow from the evidence rather than from anyone’s marketing:
- Compare within a brand, never across brands. A brand’s own 6 mg and 9 mg are in a consistent relationship. Its 6 mg and another brand’s 6 mg are not.
- Check whether the brand says “per pouch”. On the evidence above, only VELO’s Swedish site, Nordic Spirit and FRE tell you plainly. If a brand does not say, you do not know, and nobody should be filling that gap for you with an assumption.
- Treat dots, levels and words as marketing. The German data shows the middle of those scales overlapping heavily. They are a purchase-guidance device, not a measurement.
- When you switch brands at the same printed number, expect to be wrong by a lot. Measured deviations from label run from 60% under to 20% over on named products, and the free-base fraction varies thirteen-fold on top of that. If you are stepping between brands, step down.
If you want the underlying explanation of how mg figures behave, the pillar on nicotine pouch strengths is the full treatment, and the products I would actually put in front of someone are in the master ranking.
Frequently asked questions
Is a 6 mg pouch from one brand the same as a 6 mg pouch from another?
No, for two separate reasons. The brands may be measuring different things — per pouch or per gram, with no obligation to say which — and independent measurement finds products deviating from their own labels by up to 60% under and 20% over. Add a free-base fraction ranging from 7.7% to 99.2% and the two tins are not comparable in any useful sense.
Why does the same brand use different numbers in different countries?
Partly national caps — Denmark’s 9.0 mg per pouch, Finland’s 16.6 mg per gram and Poland’s 20 mg/g force different products — and partly market positioning, with each country site running its own range. ZYN is the clearest case: 11 mg tops the US range and sits mid-range in Poland.
Does a higher labelled strength mean more nicotine reaches me?
Not reliably. In the one study that measured extraction across three strengths, the 6 mg pouch released 38% of its nicotine, the 20 mg pouch 24% and the 30 mg pouch 52%. Peak plasma levels did rise with the label there, but the fraction delivered did not, so the label is a poor proxy for dose.
Is any regulator going to fix the labelling?
Nothing is imminent. Sweden’s requirement for content and per-dose figures on the pack is the closest thing in force. WHO has called for nicotine caps. The EU’s live proposal on pouches is a tax measure that defines them for excise purposes, not a labelling standard.
Sources
- Manufacturer sites, read 27 September 2026: ZYN US, ZYN Poland, on!, VELO Sweden, VELO UK, Nordic Spirit, FRE, ALP, Rogue, Pablo, General snus, Another Snus Factory (LOOP), Skruf, Swedish Smokeless Solutions (Siberia, White Fox).
- BfR (German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment), Health risk assessment of nicotine pouches, Opinion 023/2022, updated 7 October 2022.
- CVUA Sigmaringen, Nicotine Pouches, published 19 July 2023 (27 samples, 2022).
- Page MK et al., “Comparison of Nicotine and Selected Flavoring Contents Between Tobacco-Free and Tobacco-Containing Oral Pouches”, Nicotine & Tobacco Research 28(2):268, published online 19 May 2025.
- Mallock-Ohnesorg N et al., “Small pouches, but high nicotine doses”, Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2024 — funded by BfR grant BfR-CPS-08-60-0102-02.P606.
- Stanfill S et al. (CDC Division of Laboratory Sciences), “Characterization of Total and Unprotonated (Free) Nicotine Content of Nicotine Pouch Products”, Nicotine & Tobacco Research 23(9):1590, 2021.
- Heshmati J et al., “Nicotine pouch pharmacokinetics compared to smoked tobacco: a systematic review and meta-analysis”, Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports 17:100389, 2025 — funding stated as none.
- FDA, Technical Project Lead review, ZYN PMTAs PM0000593–PM0000612, signed 14 January 2025, sections 3.2.1.2 and 3.2.1.4; and Technical Project Lead review, Helix Innovations (on! PLUS).
- Sweden: Lag (2022:1257); Förordning (2022:1263) 11 §; Folkhälsomyndigheten labelling requirements.
- Denmark: BEK nr 249 af 04/03/2025 §§ 1–3. Finland: Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, 22 May 2025. Poland: Ministry of Health, 11 June 2025. Netherlands: Staatscourant 2022 nr. 10837. Norway: Helsedirektoratet.
- EU: Directive 2014/40/EU, Articles 2, 13(1) and 20(3)(b), and recital 27.
- WHO, WHO warns nicotine pouch brands targeting youth as sales surge, 15 May 2026.