Because cooling and flavour intensity are what your mouth reports, and your mouth cannot tell either of them apart from nicotine. In the one trial that held nicotine fixed and changed only the flavour, mint rated three and a half times cooler than an unflavoured pouch and more than twice as strong on flavour — and measurably less harsh. No study has ever measured perceived nicotine strength by flavour in a pouch.
This is a question I can answer better than I expected to, and the answer is not the obvious one. I went looking for evidence that mint pouches hit harder — more nicotine getting across, faster. What the literature actually says is stranger and more useful: mint pouches produce a bigger sensation and a smaller amount of discomfort, at the same dose, and the word “stronger” has been doing the work of about four different measurements that nobody has ever separated.
If you have read why two 6 mg pouches from different brands feel completely different, this is the other half of that story. That page is about what varies between cans that carry the same number. This one is about what varies when the number, the brand and the pouch are all identical and only the flavour changes.
The experiment that changed only the flavour
In a randomised trial published in Tobacco Control, 47 young adults who already used nicotine were “randomized to self-administer four Zyn 3mg nicotine pouches” in a within-subjects design across four flavours — Smooth, Cool Mint, Menthol and Citrus. Same brand, same 3 mg, same people, four flavours. After each one they rated the product on six sensory items: “how sweet, smooth, bitter, harsh, cool or cooling, and strong the flavor of the product was”, each on a 0–100 scale.
Here is what came back, with standard deviations as the paper prints them:
| Rated 0–100 | Smooth | Cool Mint | Menthol | Citrus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cool or cooling | 20.2 (26.9) | 72.9 (24.8) | 58.0 (31.4) | 21.7 (24.3) |
| Flavor strength | 23.9 (27.0) | 52.3 (31.7) | 49.1 (31.2) | 37.7 (28.5) |
| Harsh | 32.2 (33.5) | 25.3 (24.7) | 22.5 (26.1) | 25.7 (26.2) |
| Smooth | 47.0 (33.8) | 59.6 (28.1) | 52.1 (28.5) | 50.9 (26.6) |
| Burning sensation in mouth | 35.4 (30.8) | 41.4 (26.8) | 36.1 (26.6) | 37.9 (30.9) |
| Sweet | 16.9 (24.4) | 26.0 (25.0) | 29.3 (27.8) | 42.5 (27.1) |
| Bitter | 19.8 (28.6) | 17.9 (23.1) | 18.7 (24.2) | 22.0 (26.3) |
Three things jump out. Cool Mint rated 3.6 times cooler than the same pouch without flavour. Its flavour strength more than doubled. And it was rated less harsh, not more — 25.3 against 32.2, with Menthol lowest of all at 22.5 — while scoring higher on “smooth” as well.
The one result that cuts the other way is “burning sensation in mouth”, which went slightly up for mint, 41.4 against 35.4. So mint is not simply soothing. It cools, it de-harshens, and it adds a little burn, all at once. That combination is exactly what a person would describe as a stronger pouch.
I want to be careful about how much weight this carries. The sensory items were a secondary, descriptive measure: there is no significance test on any row in that table, the authors state outright that “Therefore, we did not correct for multiple tests”, and they warn that “this pilot study may have been underpowered to detect small but meaningful effects”. It is 47 people, one brand, one strength, in plain packaging. It is also the only experiment of its kind, and the direction of every sensory result is consistent.
And note the wording, because it matters more than anything else on this page. The item was “how … strong the flavor of the product was”. Not how strong the pouch was. Nobody has ever measured perceived nicotine strength by flavour in a nicotine pouch. The sensation people call strength has not been separated from flavour intensity in a single published study.
“Stronger” is the wrong word, and WHO got there first
The World Health Organization’s Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation wrote this in 2016, about cigarettes, and it is still the single most accurate sentence on the subject:
“The TRPM8 receptor is activated by both cold and menthol … which explains why menthol elicits a sensation of cooling. Menthol produces cooling and analgesia at low doses but can cause irritation and pain at higher doses by effects on the same receptors. The stimulation produced by menthol at higher doses is similar to but distinct from that of nicotine, potentially contributing to the perception of the ‘strength’ of a cigarette.”
“Similar to but distinct from that of nicotine.” A WHO expert group put the scare quotes around “strength” themselves, nine years before I wrote this. Menthol stimulation and nicotine stimulation land on overlapping machinery and arrive as one undifferentiated signal, and the brain has no way to itemise the bill.
The sensation is not proportional to how much coolant is in the pouch
This is the finding that should change how you read a flavour name. A team at Yale, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ran the ZYN range through a GC/MS and then through receptor assays. The chemistry first:
“Chemical analysis of the ONPs demonstrated the presence of WS-3, an odourless menthol-derived synthetic cooling agent in Zyn Chill (234±7 μg/pouch) as the only major flavourant and the only observable peak besides nicotine.”
Elsewhere in the same range, “Menthol was the only flavourant present in Zyn Cool Mint (5406±259 μg/pouch)”, and “For Zyn Smooth, no cooling and/or minty flavourants were detected, nor any other flavour chemical detectable with our method.”
| ZYN variety | WS-3 | Menthol | Menthone | Menthyl acetate | Carvone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chill | 234±7 μg | — | — | — | — |
| Peppermint | 201±11 μg | 1,925±140 μg | 791±55 μg | 105±9 μg | — |
| Spearmint | 209±15 μg | 470±44 μg | — | — | 1180±185 μg |
| Cool Mint | — | 5406±259 μg | — | — | — |
| Menthol | — | 1390 μg | — | — | — |
| Smooth | none detected | ||||
Now the receptors. Chill’s extract “activated TRPM8 with a potency similar to mint-flavoured/menthol-flavoured ONP extracts (Zyn Cool Mint, and Zyn Peppermint), but with higher efficacy than these extracts (Chill 39±5% higher vs. Cool Mint; 53±4% higher vs. Peppermint)”.
Read that against the table. Chill carries 234 μg of flavourant. Cool Mint carries 5,406 μg. That is roughly 23 times less material producing about 39% more cold-receptor activation — and the arithmetic there is mine, from their numbers. Cooling is a matter of receptor efficacy, not of dose. A pouch marketed as unflavoured out-cools the mintiest thing in the range.
And simultaneously, on the irritant receptor: “TRPA1 activation was significantly weaker for Zyn Chill extracts (Chill 48±13% lower vs. Cool Mint and 52±8% lower vs. Peppermint …) indicating the presence of a non-irritating cooling ingredient in Zyn Chill.” The authors’ own reading is that this combination is “thereby likely increasing the appeal of the product”.
Two caveats I will not bury. Those pouches “were purchased at 3 and 6 mg nicotine/pouch strength between July and October 2022”, and the paper reports one pooled figure per variety — it never splits the coolant load by nicotine strength, so this is a within-brand comparison across varieties, not a comparison at controlled nicotine. And the mean pouch mass across the samples was 405±18 mg, which is useful if you want to convert any of those microgram figures into a concentration. This research was funded by NIDA grant R56DA055996 and the Yale Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science, with no tobacco-industry money.
If you want the receptor mechanism in detail rather than the consequences, that is why nicotine pouches tingle, which also covers the coolant figure FDA redacted out of its own ZYN review.
Does mint actually deliver more nicotine?
In pouches: nobody has measured it. There is no pharmacokinetic study of nicotine pouches comparing flavours — no plasma nicotine, no cotinine, no release rate by flavour as a designed variable. That absence is the honest answer, and it is worth stating plainly rather than filling with the cigarette literature.
The cigarette literature does exist, though, and it points in two directions at once.
For: a 2010 study at the University of Iowa put nicotine on porcine buccal and floor-of-mouth tissue — the exact tissue a pouch sits against — with and without menthol. Per the authors’ abstract, “FM and BM permeability to both (3)H-NNN and (3)H-nicotine was significantly increased (p < .05) with addition of menthol over that of nicotine alone regardless of exposure times”, and “Menthol enhances penetration of NNN and nicotine through FM and BM in vitro, even after short exposure.” That is a real mechanism on the right tissue. It is also porcine, ex vivo, with no pouch, no saliva flow and a menthol concentration matched to nothing on the market.
Against: the one human crossover trial found the opposite of what you would expect. Fourteen smokers switched between mentholated and non-mentholated cigarettes for a week each. “The systemic intake of nicotine and carbon monoxide was, on average, not affected by mentholation of cigarettes.” Metabolism did slow — “Mentholated cigarette smoking did significantly inhibit the metabolism of nicotine (clearance: 1289 versus 1431 ml/min, two sided, p = 0.02)”, a reduction of about 10% — but intake did not rise. The authors’ conclusion was that “Our data do not support the hypothesis that mentholated cigarette smoking results in a greater absorption of tobacco smoke toxins.”
And the referee: WHO’s review of the whole question, covering the metabolic story that gets repeated everywhere, is three sentences long and deflationary. “Menthol inhibits the oxidative metabolism of nicotine to cotinine and glucuronidation of nicotine … The effect is, however, small, and TPSAC (2011) concluded that it is unlikely to have a significant effect on smoking behaviour or the development of addiction.” On brain uptake specifically, after reviewing a PET study: “Overall, the results did not provide strong support for a role of menthol in enhancing brain nicotine accumulation.”
You will also see a mouse study quoted in which menthol raised blood cotinine about 1.5-fold. The authors’ own proposed mechanism is that cigarette smoke causes mucous hypersecretion in the airway which retards nicotine absorption, and that menthol blocks that response. A pouch under your lip produces no airway irritation and no mucous response. That finding is about lungs, and it does not transfer to gums.
So: content and delivery are different questions, which is the subject of nicotine delivery vs nicotine content, and on the delivery question mint has no established effect in a pouch at all.
Mint is measurably less harsh, and that is its own mechanism
The reason this is not just a flavour story is that menthol is a genuine analgesic, by two separate routes.
The first runs through the same receptor that makes it feel cold. In a 2013 study, “Genetic deletion of TRPM8 completely abolished analgesia by L-menthol in all these models”, and — the detail that makes the point — “induced analgesia was blocked by naloxone, suggesting activation of endogenous opioid-dependent analgesic pathways.” The cooling-to-comfort link is opioid-mediated. The same paper showed a synthetic WS-series coolant reproducing the effect, so this generalises from menthol to the compounds in a Chill-type pouch.
The second has nothing to do with cold at all: menthol is a state-selective blocker of voltage-gated sodium channels — Nav1.8 and Nav1.9 among them — which is a textbook description of a local anaesthetic.
Regulators have been saying the consequence out loud for years. FDA, in its 2022 proposed menthol cigarette standard: “Menthol’s flavor and sensory effects reduce the harshness of cigarette smoking and make it easier for new users, particularly youth and young adults, to continue experimenting and progress to regular use”, and “As a result of its sensory properties, menthol can reduce irritation …, reduce coughing … and relieve pain”. WHO’s summary of the same evidence: “Both the FDA (2013a, 2013b) and TPSAC (2011) concluded that menthol has cooling and anaesthetic effects that reduce the harshness of cigarette smoke, and recent studies support these conclusions.”
Two notes on scope. That FDA document was a proposed rule and was never finalised; its reasoning is quotable as what FDA argued in May 2022, not as law. And it covers cigarettes — the word “nicotine pouch” appears in it zero times. Worth noticing, too, that FDA’s case against menthol rests entirely on sensory masking and reward, not on menthol delivering more nicotine. The regulator with the largest menthol evidence base in the world did not make the dose argument.
There is a corollary WHO draws that explains why readers disagree about this so violently. It describes two populations: people who “cannot tolerate the harshness and irritation” of the unflavoured thing and are rescued by menthol, and established users who “appear to be tolerant of and even seek stronger sensory attributes”. For the first group mint makes a pouch easier. For the second it makes it better. Neither is getting more nicotine.
The market is built as though mint were strength
Look at what is actually authorised for sale in the United States. Of the 43 nicotine pouch products on FDA’s authorised list, the pattern by tier is stark. Every authorised on! product at 2 and 4 mg is a non-cooling flavour — Autumn Spice, Cappuccino, Rich Berry — with no mint at all. At the top of the range, ZYN ULTRA runs 9 to 11 mg and is eight-elevenths cooling, and it introduced two flavour names that exist only in that tier and are pure cold-claims: “Deep Freeze” and “Wintergreen Chill”. The strongest tier invented new cooling vocabulary for itself.
That is an authorisation list rather than a market census, so it reflects which applications FDA granted. But the asymmetry is real, and it is matched by what the industry does when it wants a fair fight. When Altria funded a seven-brand dissolution study, it held flavour constant: “To be consistent, all products were mint flavored with nicotine levels between 6 and 9.4 mg per pouch based on the can label.” Mint is the category’s control condition, because it is the one flavour every brand makes. The study was funded by Altria Client Services LLC, an affiliate of the maker of on! — worth knowing when reading it.
Mint is also simply everywhere: in a survey of 50 products, “The most common flavorings in ONPs were menthol (cooling) (60.0%)”. And the loads get much larger than ZYN’s. The same survey measured “menthol (cooling) (Rogue Peppermint: 15.1 ± 1.2 mg/pouch)” — roughly 2.8 times ZYN Cool Mint’s figure, in a different brand.
What to do with this when you are choosing a strength
Three practical consequences, and they follow directly from the evidence above rather than from my taste.
Do not treat a flavour change as a dose change. If you move from an unflavoured 6 mg to a mint 6 mg and it feels like a step up, the thing that changed is the sensation, not the nicotine. The reverse trap is worse: moving from mint to unflavoured at the same strength can feel like a step down while delivering exactly as much, which is how people end up buying a higher number they did not need. If you are deliberately reducing, do it on the number and keep the flavour fixed — see how to step down your strength safely.
If a pouch is too harsh, mint is a legitimate answer. That is the one claim here with both a mechanism and human ratings behind it. It is not a way of getting less nicotine; it is a way of getting the same nicotine more comfortably.
And an unflavoured name tells you nothing about cooling. The Chill result is the proof: a product sold without a mint descriptor can out-cool every mint in the range, because an odourless synthetic coolant does not read as a flavour. Judge by how it feels, not by the word on the lid. For what the words do and do not mean, there is how to read a strength label you don’t recognise and every nicotine pouch flavour, ranked and explained. If the question behind the flavour is what the flavouring actually is, that gap turns up again in are nicotine pouches vegan?, where 46 of 56 declared aroma entries in a regulator’s census are simply “undefined”.
You cannot check the coolant number yourself, and that is a policy choice
Here is the part that surprised me most. I assumed no regulator collected this. Two do, in more detail than the EU demands of cigarettes — and neither will show you.
Sweden requires a product notification containing, in the ordinance’s own words, “en förteckning över alla ingredienser som ingår i produkten, uppdelad på varumärke och sort, med uppgift om kvantiteter” — a list of every ingredient, broken down by brand and variant, with quantities. Variant means flavour. So Sweden holds, on file, the exact per-flavour coolant loading that a Yale lab had to buy pouches and run a mass spectrometer to discover. Publication is required by the next section, with one clause doing all the work: the information “och som inte utgör företagshemligheter ska offentliggöras av Folkhälsomyndigheten” — such of it as does not constitute trade secrets shall be published.
Denmark is blunter. Manufacturers must report “Samtlige ingredienser (ingrediensnavn og mængde samt evt. CAS-nr.)” — every ingredient, by name and amount, with CAS number where applicable. WS-3 has a CAS number. And then, of the public register: “Der er ikke adgang til sammensætningsoplysninger.” There is no access to composition information. The register shows trade name, product type and who filed it. The guidance adds that not even the filing company can read its own submitted composition data back.
Set that beside FDA, which measured a coolant concentration in an authorised pouch and published the sentence with the compound and the dose blanked as trade secret. Three regulators hold the number. None of them will print it. The EU, meanwhile, leaves nicotine pouches outside the Tobacco Products Directive altogether, so there is no EU-wide ingredient-reporting duty for them at all.
Which is why a page like this has to be built out of an academic mass spectrometry run and a receptor assay. The data exists. It is simply not readable by the person putting the thing in their mouth.
Frequently asked questions
Do mint pouches contain more nicotine than other flavours? There is no published evidence that a mint variant assays higher than a non-mint variant of the same product at the same labelled strength. No study has been designed to test it. What is true is that the strongest authorised tiers are disproportionately mint-flavoured, which is a fact about product ranges, not about any individual can.
So is mint harsher or smoother? Smoother. In the only controlled test, mint rated less harsh and more smooth than the same pouch unflavoured, with menthol lowest on harshness of the four flavours tried. Mint did score slightly higher on “burning sensation in mouth”, so it is not purely soothing.
Why does an “unflavoured” pouch sometimes feel colder than a mint one? Because odourless synthetic cooling agents hit the cold receptor without producing a mint taste. One such product carried 23 times less flavourant by mass than a mint one in the same range and produced about 39% more cold-receptor activation.
Does menthol slow down how fast you clear nicotine? Slightly. The one human crossover study measured about a 10% reduction in nicotine clearance, with no change in intake, and WHO’s assessment of the whole body of evidence is that “The effect is, however, small”.
Can I use a mint pouch to come off a stronger one? You can use mint to make a given strength more comfortable, which is a real and sourced effect. What you cannot do is treat the flavour switch as the reduction. The dose is the number on the can.
Sources
- Vogel EA, Tackett AP, Unger JB, et al. “Effects of flavour and modified risk claims on nicotine pouch perceptions and use intentions among young adults who use inhalable nicotine and tobacco products: a randomised controlled trial.” Tobacco Control 2025;34(3):315–322. PMC11199376. Funded by NCI, NIDA, NHLBI and the Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust; sponsors had no role in design or analysis.
- Jabba SV, Erythropel HC, Woodrow JG, et al. “Synthetic cooling agent in oral nicotine pouch products marketed as ‘flavor-ban approved’.” Tobacco Control 2025;34(1):106–110. PMC10753027. Funded by NIDA grant R56DA055996 and the Yale Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science; no tobacco-industry funding.
- World Health Organization Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation. Advisory note: Banning Menthol in Tobacco Products. WHO, 2016. PDF via WHO IRIS. Sections 5.1, 6.1, 6.2 and 6.6.
- US Food and Drug Administration. “Tobacco Product Standard for Menthol in Cigarettes”, proposed rule. Federal Register 87(86):26454–26502, 4 May 2022. Full text at govinfo. Proposed only; never finalised.
- Squier CA, Mantz MJ, Wertz PW. “Effect of menthol on the penetration of tobacco carcinogens and nicotine across porcine oral mucosa ex vivo.” Nicotine Tob Res 2010;12(7):763–767. PMID 20511349. Quoted from the authors’ structured abstract; the full text was not reachable.
- Benowitz NL, Herrera B, Jacob P 3rd. “Mentholated cigarette smoking inhibits nicotine metabolism.” J Pharmacol Exp Ther 2004;310(3):1208–1215. PMID 15084646. Quoted from the authors’ structured abstract.
- Liu B, Fan L, Balakrishna S, et al. “TRPM8 is the principal mediator of menthol-induced analgesia of acute and inflammatory pain.” Pain 2013;154(10):2169–2177. PMC3778045. Authors declare no conflicts.
- Gaudioso C, Hao J, Martin-Eauclaire MF, et al. “Menthol pain relief through cumulative inactivation of voltage-gated sodium channels.” Pain 2012;153(2):473–484. PMID 22172548.
- Platt SP, Gonzales CM, Pokharel P, et al. “Dissolution and physical characterization of oral nicotine pouch products.” Sci Rep 2026;16(1):4406. PMC12864968. Industry-funded: “This study was funded by Altria Client Services LLC, an affiliate of Helix Innovations LLC, the manufacturer of on! nicotine pouches.”
- Page MK, Leigh NJ, Block AC, et al. “Comparison of nicotine and selected flavoring contents between tobacco-free and tobacco-containing oral pouches.” Nicotine Tob Res 2026. PMC12824957. Funded by the National Cancer Institute.
- US Food and Drug Administration. “Nicotine Pouch Products Authorized by the FDA”. Content current as of 21 August 2026; read 29 October 2026.
- Förordning (2022:1263) om tobaksfria nikotinprodukter, 4 § and 6 §. Svensk författningssamling via Riksdagen.
- Sikkerhedsstyrelsen. “Krav til registrering og mærkning af tobakssurrogater”. Read 29 October 2026.
Last verified 29 October 2026.
