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Nicotine Pouches

Fillers in nicotine pouches: cellulose, maltitol and the gum base myth

by Jose Del Pozo 13 min read
Three stacked white nicotine pouches drawn in outline on a dark background, beside the article title.

A nicotine pouch is mostly filler, and in nearly every product that filler is cellulose — usually microcrystalline cellulose, sometimes plant fibre, often with a sugar alcohol alongside it. Gum base, despite being named in half the articles written about pouch ingredients, appears in no brand’s declaration, no manufacturer’s patent and no authorisation that reaches a pouch. Here is what is actually in the bulk of the thing.

Open a 6 mg pouch and the nicotine is about 2% of what is inside. The rest is a white powder or granule whose job is to carry the nicotine, fill the pouch, feel acceptable under your lip for an hour and let go of its contents at a usable rate. That material is the single largest ingredient in the product and the one makers say least about.

This is the companion to our general guide to what is inside a nicotine pouch besides nicotine, which covers the whole ingredient list. This page takes the bulking agents on their own, because they are where the engineering lives and where the public writing is least reliable.

What the industry actually declares

The only systematic survey of pouch labels is Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment reading the packaging of around fifty products. Its filler row, verbatim:

Fillers 53 Cellulose (E460) and plant fibers, 37; fibers from eucalyptus and pine tree, 9; undefined fibers, 5; undefined fillers, 2

So of 53 filler declarations, 37 are cellulose or plant fibre and nine specify eucalyptus and pine. Seven say nothing useful. BfR’s summary of the whole dataset puts fillers in the top group of ingredient categories: “Most abundant ingredient categories with more than 40 counts were sweeteners, aroma additives, humectants (mostly propylene glycol), fillers (mostly cellulose and plant fibers), acidity regulators (mostly sodium carbonate), nicotine, and water.”

One caveat has to travel with those counts, because BfR itself raises it: “For example, maltitol may have been added to function as a sweetener or as a filler.” BfR counted maltitol under sweeteners. ZYN counts it as a filler. The category totals are a classification judgement, not a composition breakdown, and BfR says so. That paper’s authors declare no conflict of interest and the work was funded by BfR’s own intramural budget — which makes it the cleanest-funded source in this entire field.

The three brands that tell you anything

Three major brands publish something resembling an ingredient statement. They are not comparable with one another.

Brand Filler named? What it says
ZYN (US) Yes, by chemical “FILLERS (Micro crystalline cellulose, maltitol, and gum arabic): Ingredients used to add bulk to each pouch.” Plus hydroxypropyl cellulose listed separately as a stabiliser.
Velo (UK) No chemical named “PLANT-BASED MATERIALS We add plant-based ingredients to bulk the product and make it a comfortable size.” Claims to be made with “only 5 types of high-quality ingredients”.
Rogue No “Rogue Pouches contain quality nicotine bound to a polymer resin to create nicotine polacrilex”, combined with flavours “and other food grade ingredients”.

ZYN is the only one that names a filler chemical, and even its own page contradicts itself: the summary promises “a granulation agent, fillers, pH balancers, sweeteners and flavorings”, and no entry in the detailed breakdown below it is a granulation agent. Note also the spelling — ZYN writes “Micro crystalline” as three words, so a search of its site for “microcrystalline” returns nothing.

Velo’s claim is interesting for the opposite reason. It is exhaustive by category and silent by chemical: five ingredient types, one of which is “plant-based materials”, with no chemical, no E-number and no quantity. That is a different failure from a vague list. And Rogue declares no filler at all — which is an absence of declaration, not evidence of absence.

Six jobs, from the manufacturers’ own filings

Brand pages say the filler adds bulk. The patents say considerably more, and they are the only documents where the industry explains itself properly. Swedish Match’s EP 4 061 155 B1 describes “tobacco-free nicotine-containing particles formed from a carrier material, said carrier material comprising microcrystalline cellulose”, and defines what carrying means: “As used herein, the expression "included in" intends "absorbed in and/or adsorbed onto".” The nicotine is on and in the cellulose, not merely mixed with it.

The same patent sets out the problem it is solving:

There is thus a need for an oral nicotine-containing product involving little or no dust, which allows for release of part or most or all of its nicotine, which provides a pleasant mouth feeling and/or which substantially retains its size and mouth feeling during use in the oral cavity.

Read together with its sibling filings, the jobs are: carry the nicotine; suppress dust on the production line; flow fast enough to fill pouches at speed; feel right in the mouth; hold its shape for the hour it is in there; and control the release rate. EP 4 018 846 A1 puts the mouthfeel objective first — “an oral pouched product containing a filling material having improved properties, in particular regarding mouthfeel and user satisfaction” — and names the candidates: “particles of microcrystalline cellulose, water insoluble starch, silica, or a mixture thereof.”

Philip Morris, approaching the same problem with plant fibre rather than cellulose granules, states the release mechanism outright in EP 4 162 927 A1:

The inventive use of a composition having a relatively low bulk density, will provide not only a good mouthfeel, but also an effective release from the pouch, due to the fact that a relatively low bulk density promotes effective salivation and thereby release of water-soluble ingredients of the composition.

How much of a pouch is filler

For most ingredients in this category no per-pouch quantity exists anywhere. The filler is the exception, because Swedish Match published one for a named commercial product. EP 4 018 846 A1 uses as its reference “a commercial product sold under the name ZYN Dry citrus 3 mg from Swedish Match North Europe AB”, and describes it:

The filling material was constituted by approximately 84% by dry weight of a combination of granules of microcrystalline cellulose and maltitol and approximately 16% by dry weight of hydroxypropyl cellulose powder, flavour additives, pH regulators and nicotine bitartrate.

With a total filling weight of 0.34 g, that is roughly 0.29 g of cellulose-plus-maltitol granule in a 3 mg pouch — about 85 times as much filler as nicotine by mass. The patent’s generic claim range is wider: the bulk particles “may constitute 75% by dry weight to 99% by dry weight of the filling material”. Reemtsma, filing independently, gives 70–99 weight-% for its nicotine-coated plant material. Philip Morris’s architecture is different again, with water-insoluble fibre at 5–50% by weight alongside a sugar alcohol at at least 10% and water at 15–65%.

What no source splits is the cellulose from the maltitol inside that 84%. There is an indirect hint: Altria’s lab measured ZYN’s filler as 78.26% soluble, and microcrystalline cellulose is insoluble while maltitol dissolves. If both figures are right, the insoluble fraction of ZYN’s filler is only about a fifth of its mass, which would make the “cellulose” pouch mostly sugar alcohol by weight. That is my inference from two industry documents about the same product, not a finding either of them states, and there are other insolubles in the picture — so treat it as an open question rather than a number.

Gum base: why you keep reading it, and why it is not in your pouch

The calendar entry for this article promised gum base. Having gone looking for it, I cannot write that section honestly, so here is the correction instead.

I searched seventeen primary documents for “gum base” and “chewing gum”: four brand ingredient pages, seven manufacturer patents, four peer-reviewed studies, and the whole of 21 CFR parts 182 and 184. Gum base appears in none of the brand pages, none of the studies, and none of the Swedish Match, Altria or Philip Morris patents. The entire documentary basis for gum base in nicotine pouches is two items:

  • One product in BfR’s survey of 49. BfR does not write “gum base” and does not classify it as a filler — the entry is in the thickener row: “Thickener 19 Undefined gelling agent, 9; xanthan gum (E415), 7; guar gum (E412), 2; natural chewing gum basis, 1”. One label declaration, on an unnamed product, counted as a thickener.
  • One optional item in a Reemtsma patent’s laundry list (EP 3 491 940 A1), where “further ingredients preferably comprise one or more of water, non-tobacco plant material not coated with nicotine, stabilizers, humectants, plasticisers, thickeners, dyes, salts, flavours, gum base, flavour additives or any combination thereof” — and whose own preferred embodiment, in the next clause, drops it. A patent permitting an ingredient is not evidence anyone uses it.

US law points the other way. 21 CFR § 172.615 is explicit on its face: “The food additive chewing gum base may be safely used in the manufacture of chewing gum in accordance with the following prescribed conditions:” The authorisation does not extend past chewing gum. Sweden’s additive annex lists no gum base for snus either.

Two things generate the confusion, and both are real. The first is gum arabic, which genuinely is in ZYN. It is a tree exudate — 21 CFR § 184.1330 defines acacia as “the dried gummy exudate from stems and branches of trees of various species of the genus Acacia, family Leguminosae” — and it shares three letters with gum base and nothing else. The second is that two brands really did borrow something from chewing gum, just not the base: Rogue’s pouches use nicotine polacrilex, the ion-exchange resin from therapeutic nicotine gum, and Velo UK describes its nicotine as a “pharmaceutical-grade nicotine polymer”. An independent lab confirmed the first: Roswell Park reported that “ONP brands LUCY, NIC-S, and Rogue disclosed nicotine polacrilex, where nicotine is bound to an ion exchange resin and delivered via an aqueous extraction, similar to therapeutic nicotine gums.” That is a more interesting borrowing than gum base, and it is the real one.

Does the filler change the hit?

Yes, and the measurements that show it are mostly not in journals.

Altria’s dissolution study characterised the filler of seven commercial brands and found large differences. ZYN’s filler was 78.26% soluble, Rogue’s the least soluble at 41.21%. The authors connect it to delivery: “Microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) is a major component of the crystalline structure of nicotine pouch fillers. Understanding and controlling the crystallinity of MCC is essential for optimizing nicotine release profiles.” The honest limit is that they did not vary the filler — they measured seven products that differ in pH, moisture, nicotine form and pouch construction as well, so every filler-to-release link there is correlational. A separate Altria-funded permeation study attributes ZYN’s faster release to “differences in their filler formulations and pH”, which is an attribution rather than a result; it characterised no fillers.

The controlled experiment exists, and it is in the Philip Morris patent. EP 4 162 927 A1’s Table 17 varies the fibre type and measures nicotine remaining in the pouch at two and ten minutes; its Table 19 varies the loading. At matched fibre and nicotine premix, a pouch at 30 wt% wheat fibre retained 66.6% of its nicotine at ten minutes and one at 15 wt% retained 43.6%. More filler, slower release — a dose-response. The patent states the fibre-type result too: “The release results show an increased release of nicotine after 10 min for pouches comprising fibers with a relative high water binding capacity, such as pea fibers, cellulose L700G and wheat fibers (WF200).”

Caveats worth more than the numbers: two pouches per timepoint, no stirring, and the measurement is nicotine left in the pouch rather than nicotine reaching a mucosa. A patent is not peer-reviewed and the applicant chose which comparisons to publish. The right way to read it is that the industry has measured this and the public literature has not. There is still no peer-reviewed study in which filler composition was deliberately varied and nicotine release measured — a gap a 2026 review acknowledges while asking for “quantitative relationships between matrix architecture, pore structure, water transport and nicotine pharmacokinetics”. That review is funded by, and co-authored by a shareholder in, a company selling a competing calcium-sulfate carrier, which is worth knowing before weighing its framing.

The regulatory status nobody expects

Here is the thing most writing on this subject gets backwards. The two substances ZYN’s own label calls fillers — microcrystalline cellulose and maltitol — have no US food authorisation of any of the three kinds. I searched the full text of 21 CFR parts 170, 172, 182 and 184 as in force on 30 October 2026: “microcrystalline” returns zero hits in all four, and “maltitol” returns zero in all four. No GRAS affirmation in part 184, no GRAS listing in part 182, no food-additive authorisation in part 172. Gum arabic and sodium alginate do have part 184 affirmations; the cellulose does not.

Those three routes are different things and conflating them is an error worth avoiding. A part 184 affirmation is FDA having reviewed an ingredient and affirmed it GRAS for prescribed uses. A part 182 listing is a different, older mechanism. A part 172 authorisation is a food additive approved subject to conditions. MCC and maltitol presumably rest on independent GRAS conclusions, which live outside these parts — so the accurate claim is “no GRAS affirmation, no part 182 listing and no food-additive authorisation”, not “no regulatory status”.

And the whole frame is bounded anyway, because food law does not reach a pouch. Part 184’s own scope limits it to “direct human food ingredients”, each affirmation bounded by a table of food categories — beverages, chewing gum, confections, hard candy. There is no category for an oral nicotine product, which is regulated as a tobacco product. Even US food law’s vocabulary disagrees with the industry’s: § 170.3(o)(14) defines formulation aids as substances “including carriers, binders, fillers, plasticizers, film-formers, and tableting aids”, while bulking agents sit in a different category at § 170.3(o)(28) among “stabilizers and thickeners”. A filler and a bulking agent are not synonyms in US law. ZYN’s page treats them as one thing.

Sweden is the one jurisdiction with a positive additive list for an oral pouch, and it excludes these products. LIVSFS 2024:2 does list E 460 cellulose, including “Mikrokristallinsk cellulosa”, and E 965 maltitol — but § 4 limits the annex to “snus och tuggtobak”, snus and chewing tobacco, while §§ 3, 7 and 8 explicitly extend to “snusliknande produkter”, snus-like products. Nicotine pouches are in the latter group. The cellulose listing does not legally reach them.

What does exist internationally is a functional classification, and it is revealing. JECFA, the WHO/FAO expert committee, assigns microcrystalline cellulose the functional class “EMULSIFIER; STABILIZER; ANTICAKING AGENT; DISPERSING AGENT” — no filler, no bulking agent. Maltitol’s class, by contrast, is “SWEETENING AGENT; HUMECTANT; STABILIZER; BULKING AGENT”. The international additive vocabulary does not recognise the bulk of a nicotine pouch as a bulking agent at all, and does recognise the sugar alcohol next to it as one.

Frequently asked questions

What is the white powder in a nicotine pouch?

Cellulose, in most products — microcrystalline cellulose granules or plant fibre from eucalyptus and pine — usually with a sugar alcohol such as maltitol, a pH regulator, sweeteners and flavourings. BfR found cellulose or plant fibre in 37 of 53 filler declarations across around fifty products.

Is there gum base in nicotine pouches?

Essentially no. It appears in one label declaration out of 49 in the only systematic survey, where the regulator classed it as a thickener, and in one optional list item in a patent whose preferred embodiment omits it. No brand declares it, no major manufacturer’s patent uses it, and the US authorisation for chewing gum base covers only the manufacture of chewing gum.

Is microcrystalline cellulose safe to keep in your mouth?

That is not a question I can answer, and no regulator has answered it for this use. JECFA concluded that ingesting MCC in food according to good manufacturing practice showed no evidence of toxic effects in humans, and set its acceptable daily intake as “not specified” — but that evaluation is about eating it, conditional on a particle-size specification, and a pouch is not a food. Nicotine is addictive and no nicotine product is safe.

Does more filler mean a weaker pouch?

In the one controlled experiment that exists — in a Philip Morris patent, with two pouches per data point — doubling the fibre loading from 15% to 30% left substantially more nicotine in the pouch after ten minutes. In commercial products the effect cannot be isolated, because fillers vary alongside pH, moisture and nicotine form.

Why is cellulose used instead of something else?

Because it absorbs and adsorbs nicotine, flows well enough to fill pouches at production speed, produces little dust, and holds its volume in the mouth for an hour. A 2026 review notes that calcium-sulfate carriers now challenge “the long-standing assumption that cellulose fibers are the preferred carrier material” — though that review is funded by the company developing them.

Sources

Last verified 3 November 2026. The hit counts reported above were run against the source documents as downloaded on that date. The cellulose-versus-maltitol mass inference is my own and is labelled as such in the text.

Nicotine is addictive. No tobacco or nicotine product is safe, and completely stopping is the lowest-risk option. This site is for adults who already use nicotine — 21+ in the United States, 18+ or your local legal age elsewhere. Nothing here is medical advice.

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