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He's upper deckye lip pillows food.
Max vander Art's TikTok videos might sound like he's speaking in obscure language. Online, he adopts this persona known as Chetty or freezer Tarps. He graduated from the University of Tampa and he's into golf, drinking and sports bedding. But these made up sounding terms he's using upper decky lip pillows, they're describing something real. It's the slang around a rapidly growing nicotine product, one that Max and influencers like him have helped popularize. Zin.
I call it a little tea bag. It's like the size of a long dime, and it is paper wrapped around plant fiber and nicotine salt.
That's Ellen Hewitt, a writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
So basically, if you put this pouch in between your gum and lip, you could do upper lip or lower lip however you like, and wait thirty minutes, you will slowly get a stream of nicotine into your bloodstream via the mutus memorane of your mouth, and you'll.
Get buzzed like nicotine gum or a nicotine patch. Zin is part of a long line of tobacco alternatives, but the product has completely outperformed its competition, and just this month became the first nicotine pouch to be authorized for marketing by the FDA. Ellen's been charting Zin's unique rise and how a lot of its success could be thanks to an army of social media users like Max.
Zen creators have really kicked off this zin mania. For lack of a better term, all right.
So today it's my boyfriend's birthday and he does not like sweets of any sort, so we're gonna make can make a thin birthday cake.
People keep asking me, Chops, what is your favorite Zin combo? And I keep saying peppermin Zin's with some coffee. What's up, boys? A couple new termis a couple of new terms for cassinin, upper deckies, lip cushions, pillows, you name it.
Many of these so called zinfluencers are men. Most of what they're posting is silly or absurd or made for shock value, and Ellen says there's another thing zinfluencers have in common. They're essentially making Zin ads for free.
Yeah. I think what's most interesting about influencers is that they are not paid by the maker of zin right, so they are not necessarily Zin users. They are people who are content creators who are hoping to get a viral hit if they happen to make free advertising for a nicotine product along the way, Like so it.
Goes, Zin pouches are now finding their way to be upper deckies or upper gums of more and more American users, and Philip Morris International, the tobacco giant that owns z in, is profiting. But Ellen says all this online attention could also pose an existential problem for the company because the pouches are illegal for people under twenty one to purchase, and social media is swimming in teens.
I think the major risk is they want to get popular, but only a specific kind of popular. They want to get popular with adults, and they do not want to get popular with anyone who's under twenty one.
How can they control that?
The problem is they can.
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, we enter the Zinomatic universe to understand whether the same forces that fueled Zin's rise could lead to its downfall. There are a lot of nicotine products on the market alternatives to tobacco that some people use recreationally or to help quit smoking.
Like camel orbs, which are like dissolvable pellets of nicotine or nicotine gum or nictine toothpicks mouth strips that you can let dissolve in your tongue.
But Bloomberg's Ellen Hewitt says none of these nicotine products have caught on the way Zin has in the past few years.
So Zin arrived in the US in around twenty fourteen, but it spent the first few years being like completely unremarkable. Like the early branding from PMI was kind of bland. It was very medical. It was like, you know, find your Zin. Everything was very clean and white, trying to appeal to smokers to switch. And something changed around late twenty twenty one. All of a sudden, there just started to become a lot more sales of Zin. People started
buying a lot more in the US. Sales suddenly doubled over the course of a month, and then like kept growing and growing, and sometime in like twenty twenty two, you started to see a lot of Zin related content on social media, so that's TikTok Instagram reels. Like a lot of influencers are just trying to go for the same things that some creators are going for on all platforms, which is like shock value, attention grabby kind of controversial. So you know, you see videos of people who stuff
like twenty Zin pouches in their mouth at once. Like I interviewed a guy who made a Zin video where he he talks about like this is his meal prep breakfast. It's like frosted flakes, his meal prep, Zin pouches in the cereal bowl and then a red bull on top.
Offline, Zin is quite literally flying off the shelves. Last summer, there were actually Zin shortages in major cities, and that's been great for Philip Morris's earnings. Pouch sales in the third quarter of last year rose forty one percent compared to the same period in twenty twenty three, pushing the company's shares up ten percent in October. But it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about Zin that makes it so social media friendly.
It's this sort of smoking cessation product. It is not designed to be cool. Philip Morris did not design this to be like a cool product, but all of a sudden, it has become associated with I don't know, hustle culture, right wing pundits, hockey bros. I spoke to a guy who made a rap song about Zin and the way he described it to me, he was like, Zin is
really hot right now, every chad is doing it. And so for those of you who don't know what a chad is, it's just kind of a generic term for an alpha male.
Zin has gone viral, and Ellen's been tracking how that's made its use into something of a badge of honor for certain types of people.
In the story, I try to lay out a few different pockets of people who have kind of claimed Zin as their own. One of them is kind of like Wall Street junior analysts who were like huffing on their jewel jewel vapes to get through their late night Excel sheets. There's a sort of a Silicon Valley contingent people who like to use nicotine as a productivity enhancer. So like you have founders who are like using nicotine. That's kind of this like contrarian way to get a productivity edge.
And then yeah, it's largely right leaning.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was also a major Zin booster before he soured on the brand after Philip Morris refused to partner with him. He launched a competing nicotine pouch brand of his own in November.
He's obsessed with nicotine. He was talking about all the time about how Zen feels like the hand of God massaging your central nervous system. People called him Tucker Carls in They just have these like uncontrollable voices out there who are either like saying things about Zen or deciding to promote Zin or not promote Zin, or promote a rival. It's just kind of chaos out there.
Well, that does sound like a dream for the company in a way, for Philip Morris, like they're getting all this free advertising, but there's also this big risk for them in all of us right totally.
That has been kind of the blessing and curse for Philip Morris. They wanted to be popular, but obviously they don't want it to be popular with teens. So that's the crux of the story is they might just become a victim of their own success.
After the break, how the trajectory of another viral smoking alternative could offer a cautionary tale for Zin. Before Zinn became the latest buzzy nicotine delivery product to capture the popular imagination, Jewel E cigarettes dominated the market, and BusinessWeek reporter Ellen Hewitt says that company's story holds lessons for Philip Morris, which owns in.
Basically, Jewel became and potentially for good reason, the marquis villain of the teen vaping crisis.
Jewel debuted its product in twenty fifteen. By December twenty seventeen, the company was doing three point two million dollars in monthly sales. But its success had a downside. It got too popular with the wrong kind of users. In twenty nineteen, state and federal lawmakers and the FDA accused Jewel of marketing its products to minors, and as more and more teens got hooked on the products, regulators circled.
They have also been sued and had many penalties levited against them, and at some point the FDA banned Jewel. They kind of walked the band back and eventually walked it further back, but I think that really hurt their sales, and then what ended up happening is vaping kind of continued like people started buying these really unregulated important vapes. So Jewel got really like smacked down. Other vapes replaced them, and it was like really pretty damaging for the company.
Regulatory crackdowns, costly lawsuits, new competition. These these are the kind of factors that can bring a trendy product crashing down from its comfortable spot at the top.
With Jewel, of course, there were some differences, like Jewel marketing very aggressively toward teens, you know, and as far as we can tell, maybe that's not happening. But social media is full of teens, and of course this content is getting shown to miners. Of course, this could lead to miners picking up this product in in mass.
To figure out how many teens are actually using ZIN, Ellen looked at the results from the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey twenty twenty three. Data showed that about one point eight percent of middle and high schoolers reported using nicotine pouches like ZIN, and that the number hadn't grown much since the previous year. But the report for twenty twenty four, which will come out this fall, could paint a clearer picture of its growth over time.
We just don't know what the results for twenty twenty four are going to show, and as we saw with Jewel, basically if those results go up, that triggers a lot of reaction, where it's usually like government response, FDA responses, like there might be legislation, lawsuits, things like that that might get triggered by a spike in usage of teens. So it's kind of this guillotine hanging over the whole industry,
as someone described it to me. And I think PMI has to be aware that this is an enormous risk that if kids start using this, they might be screwed, you know. And Philip Morris have tried to complain to the social media platforms about certain content that they know for sure is showing underage usage.
But Philip Morris says it doesn't have that much control over what's influencers are posting about their product or who sees it. It's directed the blame toward Meta TikTok and YouTube for declining requests to remove some content. Representatives for TikTok and YouTube said their employees enforce their community guidelines, which prohibit content that shows miners using tobacco or nicotine TikTok also says the platform Drick's content promoting nicotine products
to users eighteen and older. Meta didn't respond to a request for comment.
Of course, our Zin users are older, but like a lot of these content creators are young, and I think if you know, Chetty's audience of course is going to include teenagers. Like, there's just no way that that's not happening.
Chetti aka Max Vanderard, the TikTok user we heard about earlier, didn't respond to requests for comment.
You know, I interviewed a guy who was a Zen user in his mid twenties who picked it up when he was twenty two, and he's trying to quit now. And then his seventeen year old brother like sent him a video of Chetty making jokes. And of course, if his seventeen year old brother is following this creator, like,
he's going to get exposed to Zin content. He's going to see and he's going to absorb some subliminal message that suggests that, like, this is cool, this is what college boys do, This is like how you fit in.
In the meantime, lawmakers in the US are still circling the question of how to regulate Zin, and Ellen says that just course is helping keep it in the news.
About a year ago, Chuck Schumer decided to hold a press conference where he lay ambasted Zin and talked about how this was like a pouch full of problems that was like going to hook our teens on nicotine. And so he held this press conference and talked about how dangerous ZIN is. And I guess this prompted Republican lawmakers to try to clap back and be like, you know, keep your pause off my nicotine, give me you know, nicotine,
or give me death. Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted about how this calls for a zinsurrection and I think whatever correlation there might have been already between conservatives and Zin was clinched.
How is the cultural conversation, the online hype around ZIN and the political discourse impacting who's getting into it now and who's finding Zin and who's buying it?
You know, I did talk to users who were just like, this is a better product than what I used to use, Like I wanted to stop vaping. You know, you can Zen at your desk. You no longer need to step outside, You no longer need to like hide your habit. It's really discreet and so yeah, for a lot of users I talked to you, they just said, look, I have an addiction. I used vape. I wanted to do something
else in works better for me. But I did touch to a lot of people who were picking it up as a result of these types of Z influencers on seeing the content, thinking like, oh, you know, it can't be that bad, like everyone's talking about it.
The FDA authorized several ZIN flavors for marketing this month, citing the pouches public health benefits as a tool to quit smoking, and the fact that so few young people report using it as of now. The regulator also said ZIN wasn't as harmful as cigarettes or other smokeless tobacco products, but it didn't say ZIN was safe, and it didn't recommend it for just anyone to use. What did doctors say about the health impacts of ZIN and what are some of the potential long term impacts of using it?
Most health experts agree that like combustible cigarettes really bad for you, Vaping like also probably not very great for you, And so if you already have a habit of doing those, then using a nicotine pouch instead it's probably gonna be better for you. It's not going through your lungs, and if it's going to help you quit, then that's probably good. The issue is, like, of course, the pouches themselves come
with their own problems. So if you didn't have a habit before, you are now picking these up, which might include mouth ulcers and basically a lot of like GI issues because you are swallowing nicotine laced saliva.
Basically, Ellen says she isn't really the target audience for the pouches, but in a small act of Gonzo journalism, sorry gon Zin journalism, she bought them. I wouldn't call her a zinfluencer, though her experience was pretty mixed.
I did buy a tin for researching this story, and I tried the first pouch and I kept it in too long and it made me sick. But then I can't lie. I did finish the tin eventually. It took me maybe like a couple weeks.
And did you buy another one after that?
No? I did not.
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox and Alex Tie. It was edited by Tracy Samuelson. Aaron Edwards and Raihan Harmancy. It was mixed and sound designed by Alex Suguiera. It was fact checked by Adriana Tapia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shadin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Hanso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster borg Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head
of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week.