Work out which of three things the number is before you do anything else: milligrams per pouch, milligrams per gram, or a made-up scale with no unit at all. If the can does not say which, the figure is not usable, and no amount of comparison will make it so. The rest of the label is often more informative than the strength mark, because most of it is legally compelled and the strength mark frequently is not.
There is a particular kind of shelf you can stand in front of and feel illiterate. A tin from somewhere you have never bought, a number with no unit, a word you half recognise, two dates stamped on the base and a row of digits that could be anything. The instinct is to compare it with something you know. That is the one thing that does not work.
What does work is reading the can the way its maker had to write it. Almost every mark on a tin of snus or nicotine pouches is there because a law in some particular country says it must be — and the laws disagree with each other so completely that the same figure is forbidden on one product and compulsory on the next one along the shelf. Once you know which rules the tin in your hand was printed under, the marks resolve into something you can actually use.
Step one: find the number, then find its denominator
There are three populations of strength mark and they are not interchangeable.
Milligrams per pouch is the total nicotine in the thing you put in your mouth. It is the number you want. Milligrams per gram is a concentration, and it tells you nothing until you know what the pouch weighs — which most makers do not publish. A bare “11 mg” with no per-what is the third population, and it is the most common.
Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment bought 44 products and looked at exactly this. Its conclusion, verbatim: “Nicotine content, expressed as mg per pouch or per g, was declared clearly on only about a third of the nicotine pouches examined.” The other two-thirds used a scale or a word. I have written the full argument for why the two units cannot be converted without the pouch weight in mg per pouch vs mg per gram, and the per-brand picture of who publishes what in every brand’s strength scale, compared side by side. This page is about the rest of the tin.
The same number is banned on one tin and required on the next
This is the part that surprises people, and it is the reason an unfamiliar label can look so arbitrary.
Under the EU Tobacco Products Directive, a tobacco product may not print its nicotine content at all. Article 13(1)(a) of Directive 2014/40/EU says the labelling “shall not include any element or feature that … promotes a tobacco product or encourages its consumption by creating an erroneous impression about its characteristics, health effects, risks or emissions; labels shall not include any information about the nicotine, tar or carbon monoxide content of the tobacco product”. Snus is a tobacco product. Sweden transposes the same prohibition at Lag (2018:2088) 3 kap. 3 §, which forbids labelling that contains “information om halten av nikotin, tjära eller kolmonoxid”.
A tobacco-free pouch is not a tobacco product. Article 2(4) of the Directive defines “‘tobacco products’ means products that can be consumed and consist, even partly, of tobacco”, and Article 1 brings in only e-cigarettes, refill containers and herbal smoking products as related products. Tobacco-free oral nicotine is nowhere in it. So there is no EU-level label rule for nicotine pouches at all — every pouch labelling requirement in Europe is national, which is precisely why no two tins look alike.
And the national rules go the other way. Sweden’s Förordning (2022:1263) 11 § requires, on a tobacco-free pouch, “en förteckning över alla ingredienser som ingår i produkten i fallande viktordning”, “uppgift om innehåll av nikotin i produkten och fördelning per dos”, and “en rekommendation om att förvara produkten utom räckhåll för barn”. 12 § fixes the warning text exactly: “Denna produkt innehåller nikotin som är ett mycket beroendeframkallande ämne.”
Two tins side by side on a Swedish shelf, near-identical in shape: the snus is legally forbidden to tell you its nicotine content, and the white pouch is legally obliged to. That asymmetry is not a quirk of one country. It is the structure.
What each market actually compels on the tin
Every row below was read off the instrument itself, not off a summary.
| Mark | Swedish snus | Swedish pouch | Finnish pouch | Polish pouch | US smokeless |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nicotine content figure | Forbidden | Required, plus per dose | Required, plus dosage | Permitted by express carve-out | Not required |
| Ingredient list | No | Yes, descending weight | Yes, descending weight | Not in this instrument | No |
| Manufacturing date | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Batch number | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Flavour reference | Permitted (snus carve-out) | Permitted | Mint/menthol only | Permitted by express carve-out | Permitted |
| Health warning | Yes, 30% of two surfaces | Yes, 30% of two surfaces | Yes, in Finnish and Swedish | Yes, 30% of two surfaces | Yes, 30% of two panels |
The Swedish snus column comes from LIVSFS 2024:2, whose 12 § requires net quantity in grams, “Tillverkningsdag”, a storage instruction where storage affects keeping quality, and the name and address of the maker, packer or seller. Its 13 § requires the designation snus or tuggtobak and adds that “Varumärke, märkesnamn eller fantasinamn får inte användas i stället för varans beteckning” — the brand cannot stand in for the word. Its 14 § requires an ingredient list only for “snusliknande produkter utan nikotin”, nicotine-free snus-like products, which is why a white pouch containing nicotine carries no ingredient list under that instrument and gets its list from the pouch ordinance instead.
The Finnish column is Tupakkalaki 549/2016 39 a §, which requires an ingredient list in descending weight order, “maininta tuotteen nikotiinipitoisuudesta ja annostuksesta”, “valmistajan eränumero”, a keep-away-from-children recommendation and health warnings in Finnish and Swedish — and then closes the list, so nothing may appear on the pack that is not mandatory or expressly permitted. A Finnish pouch tin is the most tightly specified object in this whole subject.
The Polish column is the most explicit piece of drafting anywhere in it. Dz.U. 2025 poz. 799 inserted art. 11hb into Poland’s 1995 tobacco act, and ust. 6 applies the whole tobacco labelling prohibition apparatus to nicotine pouches “z wyjątkiem art. 8 ust. 4 pkt 1 w zakresie informacji o zawartości nikotyny oraz art. 8 ust. 4 pkt 3 w zakresie informacji o środkach aromatyzujących” — except the nicotine-content prohibition and the flavouring-reference prohibition. Poland legislated permission to print the strength and the flavour, by name, as a surgical exception to the rule for tobacco. Everybody else arrived at the same place by silence.
The marks that are not strength at all
Most of what is stamped on an unfamiliar tin has nothing to do with how strong it is, and people routinely misread one as the other.
A date on a Swedish snus tin is a manufacturing date, not a best-before. LIVSFS 2024:2 requires Tillverkningsdag and no expiry. Livsmedelsverket’s own guidance, Kontrollwiki article 887, updated 13 August 2026, says plainly that “LIVSFS 2024:2 reglerar inte vilket format som ska användas för att ange produktens tillverkningsdatum” — no format is prescribed — and recommends day, month, year in that order, adding that “Om omvänd ordning används, det vill säga år, månad och dag, bör årtalet anges med fyra siffror.” Its own worked examples are 12 11 24, 12 nov 2024 and 2024-11-12, all the same date. The first of those is exactly the ambiguity the recommendation exists to prevent, which tells you how little force a non-binding recommendation has. I have gone through the dates on a snus can in detail in snus expiry dates and how to read a can.
A long numeric string is probably the EU unique identifier. Lag (2018:2088) 3 kap. 7 § requires that “Styckförpackningar till tobaksvaror ska förses med en unik identitetsmärkning och en säkerhetsmärkning”. It encodes, among other things, the hour of manufacture. It is a traceability mark for the supply chain and says nothing about strength.
A hazard pictogram is a classification, not a tier. BfR records that, because of nicotine’s acute toxicity, “labels for products with a nicotine content of 2.5 mg/g or higher must bear the GHS07 pictogram (exclamation mark, signal word: ‘Warning’) while those exceeding 16.7 mg/g must bear pictogram GHS06 (skull and crossbones, signal word: ‘Danger’)”. Those two thresholds are BfR’s statement of the CLP position and I have not read them off the CLP regulation itself, so take them on BfR’s authority rather than mine. Worth noticing all the same: Finland’s statutory ceiling of 16.6 mg/g sits one tenth of a milligram per gram under the skull-and-crossbones trigger. A pouch at the Finnish legal maximum carries an exclamation mark. One notch stronger and it would carry a skull.
When the label will not tell you, the cap sometimes will
If you know which market a tin was printed for, the legal ceiling gives you an upper bound even when the tin is mute. The three caps that matter are not in the same unit, though, and treating them as comparable numbers is a mistake.
| Market | Instrument | Ceiling as written | Unit | In force |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Denmark | Bekendtgørelse nr. 249 af 4. marts 2025, § 2 | “Nikotinposer må maksimalt indeholde 9,0 mg nikotin pr. pose” | Per pouch | 1 July 2025 |
| Finland | Tupakkalaki 549/2016, 25 a § | “nikotiinia enemmän kuin 16,6 milligrammaa grammassa tuotetta”, pouch 0,5–1 g | Per gram, with a weight bracket | 1 February 2026 |
| Poland | 1995 Act art. 11hb ust. 1 pkt 1 | “zawartość nikotyny w woreczku nikotynowym nie może przekraczać 20 mg/g” | Per gram, no weight bracket | July 2025, with a six-month run-off |
My own arithmetic, not anybody’s statute: at a one-gram pouch, Finland’s ceiling works out at 16.6 mg per pouch and Poland’s at 20 mg per pouch, against Denmark’s 9.0 mg. Because Poland sets no pouch-weight limit at all, its per-pouch ceiling is formally open-ended. Nine, 16.6 and 20 look like a sequence. They are three different physical quantities, and none of the three instruments mentions either of the others. The fuller treatment is in strength caps by country.
Denmark’s instrument also supplies the cleanest definition of what it is regulating, at § 1: a nicotine pouch is “et tobakssurrogat, der indtages oralt, og som er i portionsbreve eller porøse breve” — an orally taken tobacco surrogate in portion sachets or porous sachets.
An American tin is a different object entirely
If the unfamiliar can is American, nothing above applies and the marks mean other things.
A US smokeless tobacco package carries one of four warnings from 15 U.S.C. § 4402(a): “WARNING: This product can cause mouth cancer.”, “WARNING: This product can cause gum disease and tooth loss.”, “WARNING: This product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes.” or “WARNING: Smokeless tobacco is addictive.” Each must be “located on the 2 principal display panels of the package, and each label statement shall comprise at least 30 percent of each such display panel”, “in 17-point conspicuous and legible type”. The four are “randomly displayed in each 12-month period” on packages; the quarterly rotation people often quote applies to advertisements, where the statute says they are “rotated quarterly in alternating sequence in advertisements”. Which warning is on the tin in your hand therefore tells you nothing at all about the product — it is a rotation slot.
A US nicotine pouch is a differently regulated object again. As a deemed product under 21 C.F.R. part 1143, it carries “WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.” instead. Same shelf, same use, different statute, different words, different minimum type size.
Beyond the warning, 21 U.S.C. § 387c(a)(2) requires only “the name and place of business of the tobacco product manufacturer, packer, or distributor”, “an accurate statement of the quantity of the contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count”, “an accurate statement of the percentage of the tobacco used in the product that is domestically grown tobacco and the percentage that is foreign grown tobacco”, and the origin statement. No date. No nicotine figure.
The sharpest detail is what happens to the number instead. 15 U.S.C. § 4403(a)(1)(B) requires each maker to give the Secretary annually “a specification of the quantity of nicotine contained in each such product”, and § 4403(b)(2)(A) then provides that the information “shall be treated as a trade secret or confidential information”. The United States knows the nicotine content of every smokeless product on its market and withholds it by statute, while two European states compel it onto the tin. That is a policy choice, not an oversight, and it is worth knowing before you go looking for a number that was never going to be there. I should say plainly what I did not read: I established that no date and no nicotine figure is required by §§ 4402–4403, § 387c(a), § 387t(a) or part 1143, which are the instruments that impose package-label content. I did not read 21 C.F.R. part 1100, so I cannot rule out something hiding elsewhere.
No regulator will help you read the number
I went looking for official guidance aimed at a consumer holding a tin, across Sweden’s Folkhälsomyndigheten and Livsmedelsverket, Denmark’s Sikkerhedsstyrelsen and the FDA. There is none. Every one of those pages is addressed to municipalities, retailers or manufacturers, and sets out what must be printed rather than what it means. Sikkerhedsstyrelsen goes as far as disclaiming the subject: “Vil du vide mere om krav til mærkning og sundhedsadvarsler på tobakssurrogater, skal du kontakte Sundhedsministeriet.”
The single official body that has examined the question concluded the figures cannot be compared. BfR’s updated opinion sets out what happened when it matched the descriptors against its own measurements: for products in the range “‘medium’ to ‘extra strong'” there was “a lot of overlap, rendering a clear differentiation difficult”, and “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.” Among products whose words implied something above extra strong, it found measured content “ranged from 12.1 mg per pouch (product described as ‘ultra’) to 47.5 mg per pouch (product described as ‘brutal’)”. Across the sample, “The median weight per pouch was 0.6 g and the nicotine content per pouch was 9.48 mg.”
That is a regulator saying, in its own words, that the thing you are trying to read is unreadable. It is the most useful sentence on this page, and it is why I would not put much faith in a strength word under any circumstances.
So what do you actually do with the tin in your hand?
My own procedure, in order, and it takes about a minute.
- Find the designation first. If it says snus or tuggtobak, it is tobacco, it will carry a manufacturing date, and it will not carry a nicotine figure — stop looking for one. If it carries an ingredient list and a nicotine-per-dose figure, it is a tobacco-free pouch printed for a market that compels both.
- Find the number and its denominator. Per pouch is usable. Per gram needs the pouch weight, which is probably not on the tin. A bare figure is not a measurement.
- Ignore the adjective and the dots entirely. BfR measured the overlap. They are a purchase-guidance device, not a scale.
- Use the market as a ceiling. If the warning text is Danish, nothing in the tin exceeds 9.0 mg per pouch. If it is Finnish and Swedish, the contents are at most 16.6 mg/g in a 0.5–1 g pouch.
- Treat the dates and codes as supply-chain marks. Manufacturing date, batch number and unique identifier tell you about provenance, not potency.
- Judge the first one by what it does, not by what it says. Within a couple of minutes a pouch tells you more about itself than the printing ever will. That is the subject of how to judge whether a pouch suits you, and if the answer is “too much”, stepping down is the move.
The underlying physics of why two identical numbers feel different is in why two 6mg pouches feel completely different, the content-versus-delivery distinction is in nicotine delivery vs nicotine content, and the products I would actually recommend are in the master ranking. The pillar, if you want the whole strength story in one place, is nicotine pouch strengths: the complete mg guide.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my tin of snus not say how much nicotine is in it?
Because it is legally forbidden to. Article 13(1)(a) of the Tobacco Products Directive and, in Sweden, Lag (2018:2088) 3 kap. 3 § both bar nicotine content information from the labelling of a tobacco product, and snus is a tobacco product. The flavour on the front is permitted only because Sweden wrote a narrow exception: “Förbudet mot att hänvisa till smak, doft eller tillsatser gäller dock inte snus.” That carve-out lifts the taste and additive ban and nothing else.
If the can says 11 mg, is that per pouch or per gram?
You cannot tell, and that is the whole problem. BfR found the same descriptors used both ways and said the difference “is not apparent to the consumer”. If the tin does not say, treat the number as uninterpretable rather than guessing, because guessing wrong in the per-gram direction understates the pouch by a factor of roughly two.
Does a warning symbol tell me the tin is strong?
Only very crudely. On BfR’s account of the CLP rules, an exclamation-mark pictogram appears from 2.5 mg/g and a skull-and-crossbones above 16.7 mg/g. That distinguishes legal-market pouches from extreme ones, but every mainstream product sits in the same band, so the pictogram will not separate a 6 mg pouch from a 16 mg one.
Is the date on the tin an expiry date?
On a Swedish snus tin, no — it is the manufacturing day, required by LIVSFS 2024:2 12 §, and no best-before date is required at all. On a tobacco-free pouch there is usually no date requirement in the first place, so a date you find there is the maker’s own choice of marking.
Why do two tins from different EU countries carry completely different information?
Because nothing about tobacco-free pouch labelling is harmonised at EU level. The Tobacco Products Directive does not reach tobacco-free oral nicotine, so Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Poland have each legislated separately, and they disagree on whether the nicotine figure, the batch number and the flavour reference belong on the pack.
Sources
- Directive 2014/40/EU, Article 13 (Product presentation), and Article 2 (Definitions), as adopted, read on legislation.gov.uk’s republication of the as-adopted EU text. Note this is the pre-corrigendum adopted version, not an EU-consolidated one.
- Lag (2018:2088) om tobak och liknande produkter, 3 kap. 3 § and 3 kap. 7 §. Riksdagen’s plain-text service; document header states amendments through SFS 2024:888.
- Förordning (2022:1263) om tobaksfria nikotinprodukter, 11 § and 12 §, and Lag (2022:1257) om tobaksfria nikotinprodukter, 7 §.
- HSLF-FS 2023:24 (Folkhälsomyndigheten), 6 § and 9 §: the content declaration covers 20% of a largest surface, the health warning 30% of the two largest, in Helvetica bold, black on white.
- LIVSFS 2024:2 (Livsmedelsverket), §§ 12–15. Decided 16 February 2024, published 5 March 2024.
- Kontrollwiki article 887 (Livsmedelsverket), last updated 13 August 2026. Non-binding guidance by its own statement.
- Bekendtgørelse nr. 249 af 4. marts 2025 om grænseværdier for nikotinindhold i tobakssurrogater, §§ 1–3. Lovtidende A, published 5 March 2025.
- Tupakkalaki 549/2016, 25 a § and 39 a §, as inserted by laki 251/2025. Read from the Finlex page’s own served content; 25 a § applied from 1 February 2026 under the transitional provision.
- Ustawa z dnia 21 maja 2025 r., Dz.U. 2025 poz. 799, inserting art. 11hb into the 1995 tobacco act; and the consolidated 1995 Act at Dz.U. 2024 poz. 1162, art. 8 ust. 4, for the cross-referenced prohibitions.
- Health risk assessment of nicotine pouches, Updated BfR Opinion no. 023/2022, 7 October 2022. Funding: BfR is a German federal institute; the opinion declares no commercial sponsorship.
- 15 U.S.C. § 4402 and 15 U.S.C. § 4403, 2024 edition.
- 21 U.S.C. § 387c and 21 U.S.C. § 387t, 2024 edition. Note § 387t(a)(1) renders the mandated origin statement in lower case for non-cigarette tobacco products and initial-capitalised for cigarettes, in both the 2023 and 2024 printings.
- 21 C.F.R. part 1143, § 1143.3(a), for the nicotine-addictiveness warning carried by deemed products including nicotine pouches.
- Sikkerhedsstyrelsen, registration and labelling requirements for tobacco surrogates, for the disclaimer quoted.
- Checked and found nothing: no consumer-facing guidance on interpreting a strength figure on Folkhälsomyndigheten’s supervision pages (updated 9 October 2025), Livsmedelsverket’s Kontrollwiki, Sikkerhedsstyrelsen or the FDA’s nicotine pouch page (content current as of 17 August 2026). Not verified: the CLP pictogram thresholds of 2.5 mg/g and 16.7 mg/g, which are reported here on BfR’s authority and not read off Regulation (EC) No 1272/2008 itself.
