How Is Snus Made?

How is snus made? Snus is made by grinding tobacco leaf, blending it with water, salt and an alkalising agent, heating and cooling it, then adding flavour before it is packed loose or measured into small pouches. Tobacco free nicotine pouches take a different route, because they are built on a plant fibre filler and contain no tobacco leaf at all. 18+ only. If you have ever ground coffee beans for a Sunday coffee and cake, you already have a feel for the first stage, since the leaf is ground into a fine powder.

In my opinion, knowing how a can of snus came together makes the format far easier to read. The dampness of the filling and the shape of the tin all trace back to a particular stage of the process. So, this page walks through each step in order and gives the reason behind it, then follows the mix into loose cans and portion pouches. Along the way you will find the figures that are actually known, from water content to pouch weights, and the farmhouse beginnings that grew into factory work.

Is Snus Made From Tobacco Or From Plant Fibre?

Snus is made from tobacco, while tobacco free nicotine pouches are made from a plant fibre filler instead. Once they are in the can, the two can look almost identical, which is why the words get swapped so easily, even in a Berlin café. The making of each one differs, though. Snus begins with leaf that is ground, moistened and heated, whereas a nicotine pouch blends nicotine and flavour into a filler that has no tobacco leaf in it, so the leaf stages play no part in it.

When you buy snus from us, the product description is the quickest way to see which filling sits inside, and that tells you which of the two routes the product came from. We deliver to Germany, and since the cans look so similar side by side, the label does more work than the pouch colour ever will. The rest of this part of the Snus Guide follows the traditional tobacco route first, because it has more stages and more history, then comes back to the plant fibre version wherever comparing the two helps.

How Is Snus Made, Step By Step?

Snus is made by grinding the leaf, blending it with water, salt and an alkalising agent, heating it, cooling it, adding flavour, then packing it and letting it mature in the cold. That makes roughly seven stages, and each one is there for a practical reason rather than out of habit. Step one is grinding, where tobacco leaf is milled into a fine, even powder so that every part of a batch blends and portions in the same way. Step two is blending, where that powder is mixed with water, salt and an alkalising agent such as sodium bicarbonate or sodium carbonate, which turns a dry meal into a heavy, damp mass. Water is no small part of the recipe, since moist snus can contain more than 50% water.

Step three is heating, the pasteurising stage often called sweating, where the mix is warmed with steam under pressure so that it becomes stable. Step four is cooling, which brings the mass back down before anything delicate is added. Step five is flavouring, where food grade aromas go in once the heat has passed, so they are not cooked off along the way.

Step six is portioning and packing, where the finished mix either goes straight into a can as loose snus or is measured into thin pouches first. Step seven is cold maturing, where the snus rests in the cold for several days. Perhaps the table below is the most useful part of this section, because it puts the reason for each stage beside the stage itself, and the reason is usually what makes the whole process fall into place.

What Does The Heating Step Actually Do?

The heating step pasteurises the mix, which keeps it stable. It is the main thing that separates snus from chewing tobacco and dipping tobacco, which are cured or fermented instead. Most snus is steam pasteurised, with the blend of tobacco, water, salt and alkalising agent heated under pressure. Perhaps the closest everyday comparison in Germany is milk, since the long life milk and the fresh milk sitting side by side in any supermarket are both heat treated to help a moist product last, just to different degrees.

Pasteurisation in snus making is usually dated to 1822, and it cut production time by several weeks, which goes a long way towards explaining how snus moved from small batches to steady factory work. The fuller story sits under where did snus come from, if the history interests you. It is natural to want an exact temperature and time for this stage, and in my opinion it is more honest to say that each maker sets its own, since I would not want to present one maker's settings as the rule for everyone. What stays constant is the order, with the heat first and the flavour later.

Why Does The Flavour Go In After The Heat?

Flavour goes in after the heat because aromas are delicate, and adding them to a hot, pressurised mix would cook much of them away before the snus ever reached a can. It is the same logic as stirring fresh parsley into a pot of potato soup right at the end rather than boiling it for an hour. Food grade aromas are typically added once the mixture has cooled, and some recipes also include humectants such as glycerol and propylene glycol, which help the snus hold on to its moisture. As such, the cooled mass is where the character of a particular can is really decided.

The base, meanwhile, is set earlier by the water, the salt and the alkalising agent, and sodium bicarbonate brings the mix to a slightly alkaline pH of about 8. Salt seasons the tobacco in much the way it seasons a pretzel, while the water keeps the powder soft enough to pack and shape. If you want each ingredient covered in turn, what is in snus? ingredients explained takes them in order. Here, the useful point is the order, because two cans can list the same ingredients and perhaps still feel different because of how and when each one went in.

How Does Loose Snus Become A Portion Pouch?

Loose snus is the finished moist powder packed straight into a can, and portion snus is that same powder measured into small pouches and sealed. With loose snus, the shaping happens in your hand rather than in the factory. A pinch is shaped by hand into a small cylinder or ball, or pressed with a little device made for the job. That makes loose snus the older and simpler route, since the line ends at the can. It is perhaps the closest thing left to how the product was made and handled before portions existed at all.

Portion snus adds one more stage, where the moist powder is fed into a thin tube of cellulose fibre, then measured, sealed and cut into separate pouches. If you drink East Frisian tea, or simply keep a box of tea bags in a kitchen in Hanover, the idea will feel familiar, because the pouch is a fine, porous wrapper holding a measured amount of something that would otherwise be loose. The pouches then go into plastic tins that usually hold 20 to 24 of them. For a closer look at each format, what types of snus are there lays them out side by side, while this page stays with how they are made.

Why Are Some Portions Brown And Others White?

The colour comes from the pouch material. Original portions use material that is moistened during manufacture, which gives them their brown look, while white portions are left dry. Original portion snus arrived in 1973, and it reaches the can already damp on the outside. White portions keep that outer layer dry, which gives a milder taste and a slower release when the pouch first goes in. Inside, though, both hold the same kind of moist tobacco mix, so the word white describes the wrapper rather than what is wrapped.

That is why the word white can cause confusion in Germany, where an all white tobacco free pouch and a white portion of tobacco snus can sit side by side and look like twins. One has a dry wrapper around moist ground leaf, and the other has a wrapper around a plant fibre filler with no leaf in it at all. I would say the colour alone tells you very little, and the ingredients line is the reliable guide. If you are curious why a drier wrapper changes the first few minutes, how does snus work explains what happens once a pouch is in place.

Portion size is the other choice made at this stage, and it runs from mini pouches of about 0.5g, through normal pouches of 0.8 to 1g, to maxi pouches of up to 1.7g. The weight matters because nicotine content is often printed as mg per gram, and the amount in each pouch is that figure multiplied by the pouch weight in grams. A pouch of 1g at 10mg/g, for example, holds 10mg, while the same mix in a 0.5g mini pouch holds 5mg. So, one mix can be portioned at several different weights while the recipe itself stays unchanged.

How Did Snus Making Move From Farmhouse To Factory?

Snus making began in Swedish homes and started to move into factories during the nineteenth century, although snus itself grew out of a variant of dry snuff in early eighteenth century Sweden. In the early 1800s, farmers made their own at home, grinding local tobacco with coffee grinders or hand carved mills. Anyone who has found an old hand cranked coffee mill in a grandparent's cupboard can probably picture it. The batches were small and the tools were simple, which perhaps explains why the basic stages still sound so homely when you list them in order.

Pasteurisation in the 1820s was the turning point, since it shortened the work by several weeks, and portion pouches followed much later, in 1973. Between those two dates, the broad recipe of ground leaf, water, salt and heat stayed recognisable, while the equipment around it grew larger and more controlled. It could be argued that the pouch was the bigger change for the person using snus, even if pasteurisation was the bigger change for the person making it. For me, that is the most appealing part of the story, because a modern can still begins with the same first step a farmhouse did, grinding the leaf, just with far better tools.

Why Is Snus Kept Cool After It Is Made?

Snus is kept cool because it is moist and has not been cured, so it spoils faster than cured tobacco. The final factory stage is cold maturing, where the snus rests in the cold for several days. As general storage information, short term storage is typically in the fridge, and storage of a year or more is typically in the freezer. Much like fresh milk, a moist, uncured product goes in the fridge rather than the cupboard.

Being uncured is the reason cool storage makes sense, and moist snus can contain more than 50% water. The packaging follows the same practical thinking, with portion snus usually in plastic tins and loose snus in wax coated cardboard containers with plastic lids. So, if you keep a spare can in the fridge door and carry only the one you are using, you are simply following the same cool storage idea.

What Can The Can Tell You About How It Was Made?

The can tells you most of what you need to know about production if you read three things, which are the filling, the pouch style and the nicotine content alongside the pouch weight. The filling shows whether you are holding ground tobacco leaf or a plant fibre filler. The pouch style tells you whether the wrapper was moistened or left dry, and the nicotine figure, together with the weight, gives you the amount in each pouch. In my opinion, those three lines say more about how a product was put together than any amount of design on the lid.

Take Pablo snus as a worked example. Pablo Exclusive lists 50mg/g, and with a pouch weight of 0.60g that comes to 30mg per pouch, because 50 multiplied by 0.60 is 30. The same sum works for any can, whether you are reading it on a tram in Frankfurt or at the kitchen table at home. So, the next time you open a fresh can, check the filling first, then the pouch style, then multiply the mg/g figure by the pouch weight, and you will know how that pouch was made before it ever goes under your lip.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Snus
• Wikipedia: Nicotine pouch
• PharmaWiki: Snus
• Wikipedia: Pasteurization
• Wikipedia: UHT processing