A long portion is the same snus in a differently shaped bag: as long as a large portion, as narrow as a mini. That is the manufacturer’s own definition, and it is the only one that exists. No maker publishes what a long portion weighs, no standards body defines any portion format, and — this is the part that surprised me — there is no product anywhere called a “regular portion” with a published specification. “Regular” is a word people use for the thing they are comparing against. The format with the actual numbers is called large.
The definition, and who wrote it
Swedish Match introduced the format in September 2010, in a press release headed “Snus classic in elongated version”. The relevant lines, verbatim:
“Sweden’s most popular snus brand, General, is introducing an entirely new portion format, Long.”
“The new portions are more elongated to fit better under the lip.”
“The new portions are as long as a normal Large portion, but only as broad as a Mini portion.”
That last sentence is the whole definition, and notice what kind of definition it is: relational. Long is not a weight, not a dose, not a dimension in millimetres. It is one existing format’s length married to another’s width. The company gave the can’s figures — “The can contains 24 grams, distributed in about 26 portions” — and no per-pouch mass at all. Divide those and you get roughly 0.92 g, but that is my arithmetic off an “about”, not a published number.
Six months earlier the same company had launched two products in Norway described the same way: the Lab Series 01 and 02 “will be sold in a snus pouch longer and narrower than the regular portion of snus – a completely new style that better fits under the lip making it less visible.” Again: a comparison, not a measurement.
The stated reason for the format is consistently about fit and mess rather than nicotine. The 2010 release says the recipe “has been optimized to enhance the taste and reduce leakage”; the Norwegian one says the new recipe “creates less runoff than traditional snus”; and the 2015 XRANGE launch describes “a discreet portion pouch that is less runny and keeps its flavor longer”. Three launches, one problem being solved — a pouch that sits unseen and does not run.
The only published measurements are in a patent
The numbers the marketing withholds turn up in Swedish Match’s own patent filing, EP3087852A1, “Oral pouched product having a rectangular shape”. It measures commercial products in order to position the invention against them, and in doing so publishes the figures nobody puts on a can.
Its Table 1 compares three products, and the patent names two of them: “The format of Ref. 1 is, when sold commercially, referred to as ‘mini’. The format of Ref. 2 is, when sold commercially, referred to as ‘large’.”
| Format | Target weight per pouch | Length × width | Moisture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mini (Ref. 1) | 0.5 ± 0.2 g | 27 × 14 mm | 52 ± 1% |
| Large (Ref. 2) | 0.9 ± 0.2 g | 34 × 18 mm | 52 ± 1% |
| The invention (unnamed) | 0.5 ± 0.2 g | 34 × 9 mm | 52 ± 1% |
| “LaB 02” — the long/narrow Norwegian product | 0.9 g | 35 × 14 mm | ≈46.5% |
| Slim (“G.3 White XSTR PSWS”) | 0.9 g | not given | 46.5% |
| General Long | not published | not published | not published |
The LaB 02 row is the useful one, because LaB 02 is the product Swedish Match itself called “longer and narrower than the regular portion”. The patent measures it at “the maximum length (35 mm) and the maximum width (14 mm) … having a product weight of 0.9 g”. So a long-and-narrow commercial snus pouch is about 35 × 14 mm and weighs about the same as a large.
Compose that with the Long definition — large’s 34 mm length, mini’s 14 mm width — and you land at roughly 34 × 14 mm, within a millimetre of the measured LaB 02, and squarely on one of the shapes the patent lists as typical for the category: “Some typical shapes (length x width) of commercially available oral pouched smokeless tobacco products are, for instance, 35 mm x 20 mm, 34/35 mm x 14 mm, 33/34 mm x 18 mm, and 27/28 mm x 14 mm.” That composition is mine, not the manufacturer’s. It is defensible, and it is not a published figure.
There is no such product as a “regular portion”
This is the finding that reorganised the whole piece for me. I went looking for the regular portion’s specification and there isn’t one. The word appears only as prose contrast — “the regular portion of snus”, “a normal Large portion”, “Regular size for that well known feeling behind your lip” on GN Tobacco’s own shop. Never as a named format with numbers attached.
What does have numbers is large. FDA’s review of Swedish Match’s modified-risk application lists “General Portion Original Large” at a portion mass of 1000 mg, and “General Dry Mint Portion Original Mini” at 300 mg. And Swedish Match’s own clinical report, filed with that application, uses the phrase outright: “the pinch size among users of loose Snus is typically larger than the standard 1.0 g pouch”. The company’s research pages work in the same unit — “only 1-2 mg of nicotine is absorbed into the blood from a one gram pinch containing ca 10 mg of nicotine”.
So when someone compares a long portion against a “regular” one, the thing on the other side of the comparison is a one-gram large portion. Say that and the question sharpens considerably, because now you are comparing two pouches of roughly the same mass in different shapes — not a big one against a small one.
Does a long portion carry more nicotine?
I could not find a same-brand long-versus-regular nicotine pair. Swedish Match publishes no milligram figure for General Long, and its Nordic consumer sites are geo-blocked from here. That is a clean gap and I am not going to paper over it with a retailer’s number.
But the underlying question — more nicotine, or the same nicotine in a longer bag? — is answered decisively by the same patent, on the mass axis. It describes making a product with “the same snus composition as in the reference product” in a smaller format, and reports that “the amount of nicotine (9 mg) in the product of Example 2 was lower than the amount of nicotine (16 mg) in the product of Ref. 4.” Ref. 4 is a 0.9 g slim at 1.8% nicotine; the new one is 0.5 g. Same recipe, same 18 mg/g, two sizes — so the per-pouch dose tracks the mass and the concentration does not move.
Answer: a bigger or longer pouch at the same recipe carries proportionally more nicotine per pouch. It is not a different strength. Swedish Match proved the converse for itself in 2012, launching “a portion-packed snus in mini-format with the same nicotine strength as a normal portion” and explaining that it “is only half the size of a normal portion, but contains approximately the same amount of nicotine”. Format and strength are independent levers, and the company pulls them separately.
The twist: the smaller pouch delivered more
Here is the result almost nobody writing about snus formats has used, and it comes from a confidential Swedish Match clinical report that became public only because FDA published the modified-risk docket.
The study — sponsor “Swedish Match North Europe AB”, investigator Erik Lunell of CROel AB, dated 17 June 2013 — was “an open-label, 5-way, crossover study involving 18 healthy snus users”. Two of its arms carried the same 8 mg of nicotine in different pouch sizes: a 0.5 g mini at 16 mg/g, and a 1 g large at 8 mg/g. Subjects “kept the portion(s) of snus still between the upper lip and the gum for 30 minutes”, with pH and humidity held constant.
The smaller pouch won on every measure. Extracted nicotine from the mini “was 22% larger, 1.90±0.82 mg nicotine/portion”. Area under the curve “was 37 % larger”. Peak plasma concentration “was 34% larger than in Snus C although the products contained the same amount of nicotine”. The report’s own conclusion: “The 8 mg dose of nicotine, thus seemed more bioavailable from the lower volume of tobacco.”
And the mechanism, in the company’s words: “Amount of extracted nicotine is generally not linear with pouch size (amount of tobacco): it is larger with small compared to large pouches, which suggests that surface area, saliva penetration and diffusion factors may be as important determinants of nicotine uptake as nicotine content.”
Quote the sponsorship with the result every time — this is a manufacturer’s own trial, and it is stamped “This report contains confidential information belonging to Swedish Match AB.” But it is 18 subjects, a controlled crossover, and the finding runs against the intuitive direction, which is not the shape of a result a sponsor engineers. What it means for the format question is this: a long portion holding more snus does not reliably put more nicotine into you than a smaller one holding less. The relationship between how much tobacco is in the bag and how much nicotine reaches your blood is not proportional, and the geometry of the bag is part of why.
How the names stack
The format vocabulary looks chaotic until you notice it runs on four separate axes, and that the names combine.
| Name | What it actually describes | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Long | Length — large’s length at mini’s width | Swedish Match press release, 2010 |
| Slim | Width | Patent names a “Slim White Portion”; “Slim Large” exists as a product name |
| Mini / Large | Mass class | Patent Table 1: 0.5 g / 0.9 g, with dimensions |
| White / Original | Surface moisture, not size | Patent: post-moisturised = “original snus”, non-post-moisturised = “white snus” |
| Strong / Extra strong | Nicotine, independent of all of the above | Swedish Match’s mini-with-normal-strength launch, 2012 |
The proof that these stack rather than compete is in Swedish Match’s own product names. The 2015 XRANGE launch lists “XRANGE General Slim Large White”, “XRANGE General Slim Large Original” and “XRANGE General Slim Large White Strong”. Slim and large are not alternatives — slim is the width, large is the mass, white is the surface, strong is the nicotine. Four axes, four words, one can.
On the white-versus-original axis specifically, the moisture difference is on the outside of the pouch, not inside it. Swedish Match: “White Portion is a unique technology in which each portion is moistened in such a way that seepage is reduced while the flavor lasts longer” — and then, crucially, “However, the moisture content is the same as for the original portion package.” A white portion is not a drier snus. It is the same snus in a bag that was not sprayed.
Nobody regulates any of this
I expected to find at least a labelling rule. There isn’t one, anywhere, and the negative is worth stating precisely because the category reads as though it must be standardised.
- Swedish law regulates one thing about portions, and it is a count: a unit pack of portion snus “ska innehålla minst 20 portioner” — at least 20 portions per can. Nothing about what a portion weighs or how long it is.
- Livsmedelsverket, which regulates snus as a food in Sweden, sets limits on additives, aromas, lead and aflatoxins, and requires the can to state “Nettokvantitet i gram” — net weight. No portion definition appears in the regulation at all.
- EU law gets no closer. Directive 2014/40/EU defines “tobacco for oral use” as products “particularly those presented in sachet portions or porous sachets”. “Sachet portions” is the whole of it. (The directive does define the word “pouch” — but as “a unit packet of roll-your own tobacco”, which is a different object entirely.)
- CORESTA, the industry’s own standards body, published Technical Guide No. 35 in December 2025 — and it covers “tobacco leaf-free oral nicotine pouches”, not snus, and defines no format, size or weight.
So the one quantitative rule in the entire regulatory stack is “at least twenty per can”. Everything you think you know about what a portion weighs comes from a manufacturer’s patent filings and a company’s clinical report, not from law.
So which should you buy?
On the evidence, the choice between a long portion and a regular (that is, large) one is a choice about fit and discretion, not about dose. The manufacturer says so itself — elongated “to fit better under the lip”, “less visible”, “reduce leakage” — and the one controlled study that varied pouch size at constant nicotine found the smaller pouch delivered more, not less.
If you want a pouch that disappears under the lip and runs less, that is what the long format was built for, and you should expect roughly a large portion’s worth of snus in it. If you want to change how much nicotine you are taking, change the strength, not the shape. And if a brand tells you a format is stronger without changing the milligrams, ask which of the four axes they are actually moving.
Related reading
The wider picture is in What is snus? The complete guide. For the neighbouring format questions: loose snus vs portion snus, white portion vs original portion, and slim vs mini vs large pouch formats. On what the moisture axis does, see snus moisture levels; on how the product is made, from leaf to can; and for the strength question across both categories, nicotine content in snus vs nicotine pouches and today’s companion piece on the weakest pouches you can actually buy.
Sources
- Swedish Match, “Snus classic in elongated version”, 24 September 2010 — the Long format definition.
- Swedish Match, “Swedish Match launches tailor-made Snus for Norwegian Consumers”, 9 March 2010 — the Lab Series.
- Swedish Match, “General launches mini-snus with the strength of a normal portion”, 24 January 2012.
- Swedish Match, “New star in the General sky”, 9 March 2009 — White Portion moisture.
- Swedish Match, XRANGE launch, 30 March 2015 — “Slim Large” product naming.
- Swedish Match, Nicotine uptake and Snus production.
- Swedish Match North Europe AB, EP3087852A1, “Oral pouched product having a rectangular shape” — Table 1, Figures 5 and 6, and the mini/large/slim/original/white definitions.
- CROel AB for Swedish Match North Europe AB, Study report SM WS 12, 17 June 2013, filed with FDA’s modified-risk docket — the pouch-size crossover study. Manufacturer-sponsored.
- FDA, Technical Project Lead review, Swedish Match modified risk tobacco product applications — portion masses for General Original Large and Mini.
- Sveriges riksdag, Lag (2018:2088) om tobak och liknande produkter, 5 kap. 13 §.
- Livsmedelsverket, LIVSFS 2012:6, föreskrifter om snus och tuggtobak.
- European Union, Directive 2014/40/EU, Article 2(8) and 2(31).
- CORESTA, Technical Guide No. 35, Nicotine Pouch Safety and Quality, December 2025.
- GN Tobacco / Oden’s, product page — “Regular size” wording and can net weight.
Last verified: 14 October 2026.