How Is Snus Made?

Snus is made by grinding cured tobacco leaf, mixing it with water and salt, and heating it under pressure, a step that pasteurises the tobacco rather than fermenting it. Once the mixture cools, food grade flavourings go in, and the snus is packed loose or into small portion pouches before being kept cold. 18+ only. In my opinion, the process sounds industrial on paper, yet it reads much more like a recipe once you follow it in order, rather like the gap between reading the ingredients for a tortilla and watching someone actually make one.

So, this page walks through every stage from dried leaf to finished can, with a plain reason for each one. You will see why snus is heat treated while so much other moist tobacco is fermented, why original and white portions differ in moisture, and why snus is typically stored cold, which keeps it at its best over the longer term. If you searched for this in Spanish first and then switched to English, everything below is written to be followed comfortably, without a dictionary open in the next tab.

Is This About Snus Or About Nicotine Pouches?

This page covers tobacco snus, and nicotine pouches differ because they contain no tobacco leaf. Snus is the product with a manufacturing story worth following step by step. Nicotine pouches share the can, the pouch and much of the vocabulary, so most of the process below does not apply to them. I cover how they are put together near the end, where the two routes part company. If you came here from our snus homepage, it helps to know which of the two you are holding first, because a white pouch on its own will not tell you.

The quickest way to tell is the product description, which names the filling as tobacco or as plant fibre. When you buy snus from us, that is the line I would read first, before the flavour and well before the design on the lid. Perhaps it is the most useful habit anywhere in our Snus Guide, since texture and moisture both follow from it. Think of it like checking whether a bottle of horchata in Valencia is the fresh kind or the long life kind before deciding where it goes when you get home.

How Is Snus Made, Step By Step?

Snus moves through seven stages in a fixed order, and that order explains more than any single machine does. Step one is choosing cured tobacco leaf, and early recipes relied on leaf that had been air cured. Step two is grinding that leaf into a fine powder, closer in feel to ground coffee or a tin of pimentón than to shredded leaf. Step three is mixing the powder with water and salt, which turns something dry and dusty into a damp mass that can be worked evenly.

Step four is the heat treatment, where the moist tobacco is heated under pressure, and this is the stage that makes snus pasteurised rather than fermented. Step five is cooling, which gives the maker a settled mixture to work with before anything delicate goes in. Step six is flavouring, because food grade aromas are normally added after the heating rather than before it. I suspect the thinking is much the same as stirring fresh parsley into a stew at the very end in a Madrid kitchen, so the heat does not flatten it, although that is my reading rather than a published rule.

Step seven is packing, where the finished mixture either goes straight into cans as loose snus or is measured into small pouches first, and then everything is kept cold. That is the whole journey, from a dried leaf to a chilled can. Oddly enough, the step most people have heard about, the flavour, is one of the last to happen, and much of the character is already settled by the time the mint or liquorice arrives. It is worth keeping that in mind when you read a flavour name on a lid, because it describes the finish laid over a base that was built much earlier.

Where Does The Tobacco Start, And How Is It Ground?

Snus starts with tobacco leaf that has already been cured, so the leaf arrives with a character of its own before any grinding begins. Early snus was made from air cured tobacco, salt and water, a short list that later grew to include humectants, alkaline agents and flavourings. Grinding then turns the leaf into a fine powder rather than strips or shreds, which is a large part of why snus sits so neatly inside a pouch. If you picture whole peppercorns next to the ground pepper in a shaker on a bar table in Bilbao, you have the right idea.

The grinding itself began very simply. In the early 1800s, people making snus at home in Sweden ground tobacco leaves with coffee grinders or with snus mills carved by hand, which I find a rather charming picture beside the larger production that followed. Anyone curious about that longer story can read where did snus come from, so I will leave the history there. The point for this page is that the job has barely changed, even if the equipment has: turn a dry leaf into a fine, even powder that takes water well.

What Does Pasteurised Mean, And Why Is Snus Not Fermented?

Pasteurised means the moist tobacco is treated with steam and heat instead of being left to ferment over a long period. Most snus is made this way, which sets it apart from many other moist tobaccos that are fermented. The nearest everyday comparison in Spain is the heat treatment behind the long life milk on every supermarket shelf from Galicia to Málaga, although with snus the treatment is aimed at a damp powder rather than a drink. Fermentation relies on time and slow change, so the two words describe genuinely different methods, even though they are sometimes used as if they meant the same thing.

Pasteurising also changed how long snus took to make. A Swedish maker in the nineteenth century is credited with bringing pasteurisation into snus making, and the change cut several weeks from production time. It could be argued that jamón is the perfect opposite to keep in mind: a ham hanging in a bar in Seville is cured and then left to age for a long time, while snus is heat treated, cooled and kept cold. So, one is made to hang and mature in the air, and the other is made to live in the fridge, which explains a good deal about how each is stored.

When Do The Salt, Alkaliser And Flavourings Go In?

Salt and water go in early, with the ground tobacco, while food grade flavourings are normally added after the heating stage. The alkaliser, usually sodium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate, is part of the recipe too, and it adjusts the pH of the mixture. Later recipes also brought in humectants, which help the mixture hold on to its moisture. If you would like each ingredient explained one at a time, what is in snus? ingredients explained does exactly that, so here I am only interested in where salt, water and flavourings sit in the order of work.

Flavourings are where the recipe opens up. Published analysis of snus lists spices, oils and flavours, and Swedish flavours include liquorice, lemon, cinnamon, clove, cherry and mint, with menthol turning up as the most abundant flavour compound in the samples studied. In my opinion, that list reads a little like the spice cupboard in a Spanish home, where cinnamon and lemon peel already sit side by side for arroz con leche. That being said, the tobacco underneath still does a great deal of the work, and the flavour is laid over it rather than replacing it.

How Does Loose Snus Become A Portion Pouch?

Loose snus stays as a moist mixture in the can, while portion snus is measured into small sachets during manufacture. Both start from the same prepared tobacco, so the difference arrives at the packing stage rather than earlier in the process. Loose snus is shaped by the user, by hand or with a small cylindrical device, into a pinch sized pellet. Portion snus does that measuring for you, and the result looks rather like a miniature infusion bag, the kind you might drop into a cup of chamomile after a long dinner in Barcelona, filled with moist powder instead of dried flowers.

Portion sizes vary more than many people expect. Northern European portions come in sizes running from mini, small and slim through medium and large to maxi, and the average portion weight in one published analysis came to about 0.85g. That weight matters because it is part of how strength per pouch is worked out, which I return to further down. Perhaps it also explains why portion size is worth a glance on the lid, since a slim portion and a large one simply hold different amounts of the same mixture.

Once the mixture is in its pouches, the pouches go into cans and the cans go into cold storage, just as loose snus does. If you would like the formats laid out side by side, with the styles each one comes in, what types of snus are there covers that properly. For this page, the useful idea is that loose and portion snus are the same recipe taking two different exits from the production line, a little like the same batch of turrón from Alicante being sold as a whole bar or cut into small squares for the Christmas table.

Why Are Original Portions Moister Than White Portions?

Original portions are moistened further during manufacture, and white portions are drier. That single difference explains most of what separates the two styles. The tobacco inside a white portion is still moist, though, because moist snus is often described as containing more than 50% water, while measured products vary widely. In other words, white describes how the portion was finished, and it does not mean the tobacco has been swapped for something else.

Moisture and pH are the two dials a maker can turn, and published figures show how far apart products can sit. Measured moisture across one set of analysed snus products ran from 27.4% to 59.5%, with northern European snus averaging about 47% against about 31% for US portion snus. The pH is the other half, adjusted with the alkaliser, and what that means once the pouch is in place is explained in how does snus work. In my opinion, pH is the most overlooked part of the recipe, simply because a lid rarely mentions it the way it mentions flavour.

How Are Nicotine Pouches Made Without Tobacco Leaf?

Nicotine pouches leave out the leaf entirely, so there is no grinding of tobacco and no pasteurising stage of the kind described above. Instead, the filling is built from plant based fibres, nicotine and flavourings. That is why the route through production is so different, even though the can on a shelf in Madrid looks much the same. I think of it as two dishes served in the same cazuela, each cooked from a different set of ingredients.

You can work out the amount of nicotine in a single pouch yourself, and the sum is the same for tobacco snus. Take the mg/g strength and multiply it by what one pouch weighs, in grams. Take Pablo Exclusive from our Pablo snus range: at 50mg/g with a 0.60g pouch, it comes to 30mg per pouch. Across our shelf, strengths run from 3mg to 150mg per pouch, so this little calculation is a handy way to see where a can sits before you open it, and it is the reason the portion weight from earlier is worth knowing.

Why Is Snus Kept Cold, And How Long Does It Keep?

Snus is typically stored cold, which keeps it at its best over the longer term. Tobacco snus is typically refrigerated for short term storage of up to a few months, and it is usually frozen when it needs to last a year or longer. Even so, a can that is already open for use is fine out of the fridge for a week or longer, which is useful to know if you are taking one away for a weekend in Granada.

So, the practical side follows from those facts. Cans for the coming months suit the fridge, and a stock meant to last a year or longer suits the freezer. Then, before you choose your next one, check the filling, the portion style and the mg per pouch, in that order.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Snus
• PubMed Central: Chemical analysis of snus products from the United States and northern Europe
• Wikipedia: Nicotine pouch