A Swedish snus can is legally required to carry a date of manufacture, not a best-before date. Regulation LIVSFS 2024:2 § 12, in force since 1 April 2024, mandates four things: net weight in grams, the manufacturing day, a storage instruction, and the maker’s name and address. A best-before date is the manufacturer’s own addition.
Most writing about snus dates gets this backwards, including Swedish Match’s own English-language site. The regulation that governs the pack is a food regulation rather than a tobacco one, which is where the confusion starts, and the two dates on a Swedish can run in opposite directions: one tells you when the snus was made, the other when the company thinks it stops being good. Only the first is law.
This article is about the markings themselves — what has to be there, what each thing means, and what is forbidden. If what you actually want is how long a tin lasts, I have written that up separately for snus and for nicotine pouches.
The four markings Swedish law requires
The instrument is Livsmedelsverkets föreskrifter (LIVSFS 2024:2) om snus, snusliknande produkter och tuggtobak, decided 16 February 2024 and in force from 1 April 2024. It repealed the older LIVSFS 2012:6 outright. Section 12, under the heading “Uppgifter på förpackningar”, lists what a pack delivered direct to a consumer must carry:
“1. Nettokvantitet i gram. 2. Tillverkningsdag. 3. Förvaringsanvisning, om förvaringen har betydelse för hållbarheten. 4. Namn på och adress till tillverkaren, förpackaren eller säljaren.”
In English: net quantity in grams; day of manufacture; a storage instruction, if storage matters to shelf life; and the name and address of the manufacturer, packer or seller. That address may be replaced by a Swedish website or telephone number.
Two more sections complete the picture. Section 13 requires the product designation itself — the word snus or tuggtobak — and expressly forbids substituting a brand name for it: “Varumärke, märkesnamn eller fantasinamn får inte användas i stället för varans beteckning.” Section 15 requires all of it in Swedish, and adds that the information must be “väl synliga, klart läsbara, beständiga och lätta att förstå” — clearly visible, legible, durable and easy to understand.
Notice what is absent from that list. There is no best-before date. I searched the full text of the regulation for both bäst före and hållbarhetsdatum and found zero occurrences of each. The only date Swedish law demands on a can of snus is the day it was made.
The reason a food agency writes the rules at all is a piece of legislative plumbing worth knowing. Snus is not food. Livsmedelsverket says so in terms: “Snus, snusliknande produkter och tuggtobak är inte livsmedel enligt definitionen av livsmedel i artikel 2 i förordning (EG) nr 178/2002.” What section 3 of the Swedish Food Act does is equate snus with food — jämställs med, not är — as a legal-technical device so that selected parts of food law can be applied to it.
Reading the date, when no format is prescribed
Having required a manufacturing date, the regulation then says nothing at all about how to write it. That is not an oversight you have to infer: Livsmedelsverket states it outright in its own guidance, and then recommends a format without mandating one.
“LIVSFS 2024:2 reglerar inte vilket format som ska användas för att ange produktens tillverkningsdatum. För att uppgiften om tillverkningsdag ska vara lätt att förstå för konsumenten rekommenderar Livsmedelsverket att datumet anges med dag, månad och år i nämnd ordning.”
Day, then month, then year. The month may be digits, the full name, or the first three letters. And if a producer reverses it, the agency asks for a four-digit year: “Om omvänd ordning används, det vill säga år, månad och dag, bör årtalet anges med fyra siffror.” The guidance carries three worked examples, which are the most practical thing on this page: 12 11 24, 12 nov 2024 and 2024-11-12 all express the same date.
So a bare six-digit string on a Swedish can is day-month-year unless there is a four-digit year leading, in which case it is the other way round. That is a recommendation rather than a rule, and Livsmedelsverket attaches the standard disclaimer that its guidance “är inte bindande och utesluter inte andra sätt att uppfylla kraven”.
I could not establish where on the can the date is printed. I looked for a manufacturer statement on lid, base or side and found none; Swedish Match’s consumer sites are behind age and cookie walls that serve no readable content. The closest thing is the company’s returns instruction, which asks customers to quote a stämpeldatum — a stamp date — when reporting a problem. That implies a stamped date exists. It does not tell you which face it is on, and I am not going to guess.
The best-before date is the company’s, not the law’s
Swedish Match does print a best-before date, and says so. Its English corporate FAQ states: “We always label the snus cans with a ‘Best before’ date. When you keep it refrigerated, snus will usually stay fresh much longer than that date.”
Its Swedish-language FAQ is more complete, and more accurate: “Snusdosorna märks alltid med tillverknings-datum och bäst-före-datum.” The cans are always marked with both a manufacturing date and a best-before date. That maps exactly onto the law — one of those two is mandatory and the other is voluntary — and it is a small object lesson in reading company communications in the language the product is actually sold in.
The same English page is where the manufacturer’s shelf-life figures come from: “the shelf life for moist loose snus is 14 weeks, for moist portion-packed snus 20 weeks and for the dry assortments 30 weeks”, with freezing described as good for up to a year. Those are company claims, not regulatory requirements, and they are not what the stamped date means.
The third date on the can, which almost nobody knows is there
There is a second mandatory marking on every tobacco snus can in Sweden, and it encodes a date and an hour. It comes from tobacco law rather than food law. The Swedish Tobacco Act, 3 kap. 7 §, requires that “Styckförpackningar till tobaksvaror ska förses med en unik identitetsmärkning och en säkerhetsmärkning” — unit packets must carry a unique identifier and a security marking.
Snus came inside the EU traceability system on 20 May 2024, with a sell-through window for older stock that Folkhälsomyndigheten describes as running “fram till den 20 maj 2026”. That window has now closed, so as of today every tobacco snus can legally on sale in Sweden carries one.
What the identifier contains is set by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/574, Article 8(1), and the last element is the interesting one: “in the last position, the time stamp in the form of a numeric sequence of eight characters, in the format YYMMDDhh, indicating the date and time of manufacture.” Year, month, day and hour. Article 21(4) then allows manufacturers to “add the time stamp separately from the data carrier in the format YYMMDDhh as a human readable code.”
Which means that an eight-digit numeric string printed next to a Data Matrix, QR or DotCode on a Swedish can is very probably a manufacturing timestamp down to the hour — not a best-before date and not a food lot number. Two honest caveats: Article 21(4) is permissive, so where a maker does not print it in the clear, the timestamp exists only inside the machine-readable code; and this is a third, legally distinct concept from both the LIVSFS manufacturing day and any food lot mark. Three date-ish things can sit on one can and they are not the same thing.
On the food lot mark, I will report the position rather than resolve it. The EU lot-marking directive, 2011/91/EU, requires an indication preceded by the letter “L” on foodstuffs, and Sweden’s implementation, SLVFS 1993:20, is still listed as in force and is drafted as a sweep-up that applies “för livsmedel i allmänhet”. But snus is not a foodstuff in EU law, and LIVSFS 2024:2 contains no lot concept at all — zero occurrences of parti. Whether the 1993 lot rule reaches snus is not settled on the public record, and I found no document either way. In practice it may not matter: section 7 of SLVFS 1993:20 excuses a lot mark where an uncoded day-and-month durability date is already printed.
What a Swedish can is forbidden to tell you
Here is the part that catches people out. A can of Swedish tobacco snus may not state its nicotine content. That is not a convention — it is a prohibition. The Tobacco Act, 3 kap. 3 §, says the labelling of a tobacco product may not “innehålla information om halten av nikotin, tjära eller kolmonoxid”.
The same section bans references to taste, smell or additives — and then carves snus out of that one specifically: “Förbudet mot att hänvisa till smak, doft eller tillsatser gäller dock inte snus.” So a Swedish snus can may say “Mint” and may not say “11 mg/g”. Once you know the asymmetry, the design of every Swedish can makes sense.
There is no ingredient list either. Section 14 of LIVSFS 2024:2 requires one only for snusliknande produkter utan nikotin — snus-like products without nicotine. Tobacco snus is not covered, and nicotine-containing white pouches are not covered. Livsmedelsverket confirms it: nicotine-containing snus-like products “behöver däremot varken beteckning eller ingrediensförteckning”.
That has a consequence worth stating plainly. The regulation sets additive limits — potassium sorbate at most 2 g/kg, propionates at most 2 g/kg, propylene glycol at most 40 g/kg, sorbitol at most 100 g/kg — and contaminant limits for lead, certain aflatoxins, benzo(a)pyrene and, for snus and chewing tobacco, tobacco-specific nitrosamines. None of that is readable off the can. They are manufacturing constraints, not label content. If you want to know what is in the tin, the GothiaTek standard and how snus is made are better routes than the packaging.
What the can does carry is a health warning, and its wording is fixed. Folkhälsomyndigheten’s regulation HSLF-FS 2016:46, 4 kap., sets it for smokeless tobacco: “Denna tobaksvara skadar hälsan och är beroendeframkallande”, on the two largest surfaces, covering 30% of each, in black Helvetica bold on white. That is the Swedish rendering of the EU text in Article 12 of Directive 2014/40/EU, “This tobacco product damages your health and is addictive.”
A white-pouch can says the opposite
Put a tin of tobacco snus next to a tin of tobacco-free pouches and the law is giving the two manufacturers near-opposite instructions.
Tobacco-free products are governed by the Swedish Act on tobacco-free nicotine products, Lag (2022:1257), whose 7 § requires packs to carry “en innehållsdeklaration och en text som upplyser om nikotinets skadeverkningar”. The content of that declaration is set by Förordning (2022:1263), 11 §: a full ingredient list in descending order of weight, “uppgift om innehåll av nikotin i produkten och fördelning per dos” — nicotine content and the per-dose split — and a recommendation to keep the product out of reach of children. The warning text is fixed at 12 §: “Denna produkt innehåller nikotin som är ett mycket beroendeframkallande ämne.”
So the nicotine figure that a tobacco snus can is forbidden to print is the one a white-pouch can is required to print. That single difference explains most of why comparing the two is harder than it should be, and I have gone further into it in nicotine content in snus versus nicotine pouches.
| Marking | Swedish tobacco snus | Swedish tobacco-free pouches | US smokeless tobacco |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date of manufacture | Required | Required | Not required |
| Best-before date | Voluntary | Voluntary | Not required |
| Net weight | Required, in grams | Required, in grams | Required, by weight, measure or count |
| Nicotine content | Prohibited | Required, including per dose | Not required |
| Ingredient list | Not required | Required, descending weight | Not required |
| Health warning | “Denna tobaksvara skadar hälsan…”, 30% of two largest faces | “Denna produkt innehåller nikotin…”, 30% of two largest faces | One of four rotating warnings, 30% of two display panels |
| Product designation | Required: “snus” or “tuggtobak” | Not required | Not required |
| Unique traceability code | Required since 20 May 2024 | Not required (tobacco products only) | Not required |
| Keep away from children | Not required | Required | Not required |
A US can tells you less
If you are reading an American can, there is no date requirement of any kind. What is mandatory is the warning, under 15 U.S.C. § 4402(a)(1), which requires one of four statements: “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”; “WARNING: Smokeless tobacco is addictive.” Each must sit on the two principal display panels at 30% of each, in 17-point type, and must be rotated across a brand over a 12-month period under a plan approved by FDA. Quarterly rotation applies to advertising, not to packs.
Beyond the warning, FDA’s exhaustive list of other package requirements runs to four items: the manufacturer, packer or distributor’s name and place of business; an accurate statement of quantity; the percentage of domestically grown versus foreign grown tobacco; and the words “Sale only allowed in the United States”. No date, no lot code, no nicotine figure. I confirmed the absence by reading § 4402 and FDA’s own labelling page; that is not the same as having read every line of 21 C.F.R. part 1143, so take it as a strong negative rather than an absolute one. Any best-before date on a US can is therefore entirely the manufacturer’s own.
So what does the date actually tell you?
A manufacturing date tells you age, and age is the thing that matters for a product whose decline is a loss of moisture and aroma rather than a safety cliff. Swedish Match describes the failure mode itself: “Most often old snus just dries out and loses much of its aroma and flavor. There is a very small risk that it will start to mold.”
The mechanism has one piece of primary support I would use carefully. A 2023 analytical-chemistry paper in RSC Advances measured nicotine volatilising from snus under controlled temperature and humidity and found that “at low temperature and low humidity, the length of storage time has little effect on the volatile release of nicotine from the snus pouch”, with release accelerating above roughly 30 °C and 80% relative humidity. That is a real result and it is the mechanistic basis for refrigeration advice — but the experiment placed a bare pouch in an open climate chamber and drew air across it. It did not measure a sealed can, and it does not quantify how much nicotine a tin loses over a shelf life. Nobody has published that. For what moisture does more broadly, snus moisture levels is the fuller treatment.
Common questions
If the date on my can is six digits, which way round is it? Day, month, year, on Livsmedelsverket’s recommendation. A leading four-digit year means the reverse order. No format is legally prescribed, so a producer may do something else.
Is it a best-before date or a manufacturing date? On a Swedish-market can, probably both are printed. Only the manufacturing date is required by law. Swedish Match’s Swedish-language FAQ says the cans are always marked with both.
What is the long number next to the square barcode? If it is eight digits, it is most likely the EU traceability timestamp in YYMMDDhh — the year, month, day and hour of manufacture. It is not a best-before date.
Why does the can not say how many milligrams it is? Because Swedish law forbids a tobacco product’s labelling from carrying nicotine content. Tobacco-free pouches are required to state it, which is why white-pouch tins do and snus tins do not. The strength caps by country guide covers where the limits themselves come from.
Is there an ingredient list? Not on tobacco snus, and not on nicotine-containing white pouches. Only snus-like products with no nicotine must carry one.
Can I still use a can past its best-before date? That date is the manufacturer’s quality estimate, not a safety limit, and the company’s own description of old snus is drying and flavour loss. The practical answer, and the storage arithmetic behind it, is in how long a can of snus lasts. If you are choosing what to buy rather than assessing what you have, the master ranking is the better starting point, and the complete snus guide is the overview this page sits under.
Sources
- Livsmedelsverket, LIVSFS 2024:2 om snus, snusliknande produkter och tuggtobak (PDF), decided 16 February 2024, in force 1 April 2024, repealing LIVSFS 2012:6. Sections 12 to 15 and the additive and contaminant annexes.
- Livsmedelsverket Kontrollwiki, Snus, snusliknande produkter och tuggtobak, page last updated 13 August 2026 — the date-format recommendation, the worked examples and the statement that snus is not a foodstuff.
- Lag (2018:2088) om tobak och liknande produkter, 3 kap. 1 §, 3 § and 7 §.
- Lag (2022:1257) om tobaksfria nikotinprodukter, 7 §; and Förordning (2022:1263), 11 § and 12 §.
- Folkhälsomyndigheten, HSLF-FS 2016:46 (PDF), 4 kap. — the smokeless health warning, its placement and its size; and questions and answers on traceability and security marking.
- Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/574, Article 8 and Article 21; and Directive 2014/40/EU, Article 12. Read in the as-adopted EU text published by the UK National Archives, because EUR-Lex would not serve the text.
- Swedish Match corporate FAQ, What happens to Swedish snus that becomes old and its Swedish-language FAQ. Company statements, read 23 October 2026.
- 15 U.S.C. § 4402, United States Code 2023 edition (PDF); and US FDA, Smokeless Tobacco Labeling and Warning Statement Requirements.
- Directive 2011/91/EU on lot marking and Livsmedelsverket’s SLVFS 1993:20, identifikationsmärkning av livsmedelspartier.
- “The volatile release evaluation of nicotine from snus products under different storage conditions based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy technology”, RSC Advances 2023;13(33), doi:10.1039/d3ra03977c, PMC10391323.
Last verified 23 October 2026.
