Where Did Snus Come From?

Snus began in Sweden, where people started tucking moist, ground tobacco beneath the upper lip during the early 1800s. It grew out of the older European habit of sniffing powdered snuff, a habit that Spain, and Seville in particular, helped to build long before Sweden made it its own. 18+ only. If you have ever walked past the grand old tobacco factory in Seville and wondered what went on inside, you are already holding one end of this thread, and Sweden is holding the other.

Whether you are completely new to snus or you already buy snus from us, I think the history makes far more sense once each date is put in its proper place. In this part of our Snus Guide, I will walk from the snuff mills of Andalusia to Swedish farm kitchens, then on to the factories and finally the pouch. I will also be honest wherever the record goes quiet, because, as far as anyone can tell, nobody wrote down the moment someone first moved tobacco from nose to lip.

Is Snus Swedish, Or Does It Belong To All Of Scandinavia?

Snus is Swedish at heart, and while the wider Scandinavian region shares the habit, Sweden is where the moist form developed and where its long history is concentrated. You will sometimes see snus described as Nordic or Scandinavian, which is not wrong so much as a little broad. In my opinion, it is rather like calling paella simply Spanish: true enough, although anyone in Valencia will happily tell you exactly where it belongs. The habit took root in Swedish towns and on Swedish farms, and even the name it carries today is a Swedish word.

The simplest answer to where snus comes from is Sweden, with the rest of the story following. The rest is longer than most people expect, because the tobacco itself came from the Americas, the early manufacturing happened in Spain, the fashion for powdered tobacco passed through Portugal and France, and only later did Swedes turn it into something moist that sat under the lip. Perhaps the neatest way to picture it is as a relay race, with Seville running one of the earliest legs and Sweden carrying the baton over the line.

Why Do You See So Many Different Dates For Snus?

You see different dates because each one marks a different stage of the story: tobacco being manufactured in Europe, snuff reaching Sweden, and the moist Swedish form appearing. The earliest dates, in the 1500s, belong to tobacco and powdered snuff in southern Europe, when the first tobacco manufacturers on the continent set up in Seville in the early 16th century. The tale usually told about the rise of snuff also sits in that century, crediting Jean Nicot, a French diplomat in Portugal, with presenting powdered tobacco to Catherine de' Medici.

The next cluster of dates belongs to Sweden itself. Nasal snuff spread there in the early 17th century, so any date you find in the 1600s is really about Swedes sniffing powder rather than tucking anything under the lip. Then, in 1724, King Fredrik I wanted Swedes to grow their own tobacco, and farmers began grinding leaf from their own fields. That explains why some histories place a turning point in the early 1700s, since it was the moment tobacco became a homegrown, everyday material for ordinary Swedish households rather than something brought in from abroad.

The date that actually answers the question comes in the early 19th century, when Swedish users moved from nasal snuff to moist snus. Even here, the record is not perfectly precise, and the most careful accounts say early 1800s rather than naming a single year. I find that reassuring rather than frustrating, because a habit that spread from one kitchen to the next would hardly arrive with a birth certificate. As such, I would treat any account offering one exact founding day for snus with gentle curiosity, and look at the timeline below to see which stage it is really describing.

What Does Seville Have To Do With The Story?

Seville matters because it was where Europe first turned tobacco into a manufactured product, and for centuries it was the only place in Spain making snuff. The first tobacco manufacturers in Europe set up there in the early 16th century, and the city's first dedicated factory, San Pedro, opened in 1620 before a new factory replaced it in 1687. Horses turned the grinding mills, and by 1763 the operation employed about 1,000 men, 200 horses and 170 snuff mills. That is a remarkable amount of powdered tobacco to picture coming out of a single Andalusian city.

If you know Seville, you know the building that grew out of that trade, the Royal Tobacco Factory, which today is the main building of the University of Seville, after the move was decided in 1950 and the conversion carried out between 1954 and 1956. Students now walk the corridors of a place once built around horses and mills, which I think is one of the more charming turns in European history. Seville's powdered snuff belongs to the older nasal branch from which Swedish snus later grew.

How Did Snuff Travel From The French Court To Sweden?

Snuff reached Sweden as a fashion, carried north from the courts of western Europe, and it had arrived there by the early 17th century. The story most often told begins with Jean Nicot, the French diplomat posted to Portugal, presenting powdered tobacco to Catherine de' Medici, and the word nicotine still carries his name today. Whether every detail of that tale is accurate is hard to say, but it shows how powdered tobacco moved from the ports of the Iberian peninsula into the French court, and from there towards the rest of the continent.

For a reader in Madrid or Barcelona, the useful point is that Sweden did not invent snuff; it borrowed a habit that southern and western Europe had already made fashionable. What Sweden did, over the following two centuries, was make that habit its own. That being said, the Swedish version did not happen overnight, and for a long stretch Swedes took their snuff exactly as everyone else did, through the nose, from small boxes and with all the manners that went with them. The move to the lip came much later, as the next sections explain.

What Does The Word Snus Actually Mean?

Snus is simply the Swedish word for snuff, and the English word snuff itself comes from the Dutch snuif. That shared root is a useful clue, because it tells you the Swedish product began life as powdered tobacco for the nose and kept its name when the habit changed shape. Words often outlive the thing they first described, and snus is a good example of that.

This also means that old written mentions of snus need reading with care. A Swedish reference to snus from the 1700s may well describe nasal snuff rather than anything placed under the lip, simply because the same word covered both. So, with an old account, it helps to look at how the tobacco was prepared and how it was taken before deciding which product it describes. It is a small habit, but it saves a lot of confusion whenever one history seems to contradict another, and it explains most of the disagreement you will find about dates.

How Did Swedes Turn Dry Snuff Into Moist Snus?

Swedes turned dry snuff into moist snus gradually, as people preparing their own tobacco began making it damp and placing it under the lip in the early 1800s. The groundwork had been laid a century earlier, when King Fredrik I wanted Sweden to grow its own tobacco from 1724 and farmers started grinding leaf from local fields. That put tobacco into ordinary rural households, and it gave country people the raw material to experiment with.

Moist snus was often made at home using coffee grinders or hand carved mills, which is a world away from the 170 horse driven mills of Seville. The mixture itself was plain, made from ground tobacco leaves, water, salt and potash, and it was the sort of thing a household could prepare at the kitchen table. For the recipe as it stands today, our page on what is in snus picks up the story in the present day.

Why the move from nose to lip happened is the part nobody can answer with certainty. Perhaps a moist preparation simply suited people working in the fields who could not stop to take a pinch, or perhaps it spread through habit from one village to the next; I would not want to present either idea as fact. What the record does show is the result, a distinctly Swedish product that kept the old name of snuff while changing almost everything about how it was taken.

When Did Snus Move From Farm Kitchens To Factories?

Snus moved into factories over the course of the 1800s, as makers took the home recipe and produced it at a larger scale. Early makers heated the tobacco at about 50 to 80 °C and often added flavourings such as salmiac, pepper, and lemon or bergamot oil, which tells you that taste mattered from the very start. I find the bergamot detail rather lovely, because anyone who has ordered an Earl Grey in a café in Seville will recognise it. For the modern side of production, how is snus made takes you through it.

From 1915, Swedish snus was produced by essentially one state owned company, although some accounts give 1914 as the starting point, and that single company era lasted into the 1960s. Readers in Spain will recognise the idea, because tobacco making in Seville carried on long after the old building became a university, under Spain's own state tobacco company, which merged into a larger group in 1999. The city's plant closed at the end of 2007, and it strikes me that two countries so far apart once shared such a similar arrangement.

When Did The Pouch Arrive, And Why Is It Now The Usual Form?

The pouch arrived in Sweden in the 1970s, well over a century after the moist form first appeared, and I suspect it is how most people meet snus today. Before then, users shaped loose snus into a small portion with their fingers, which took a little practice to get right. The pouch did the portioning for you, and in my opinion that tidiness is the main reason it won people over. If you are curious about the formats that followed, what types of snus are there sets them out side by side.

Much later came nicotine pouches, which keep the same under the lip format but leave out the tobacco leaf. They belong to this history because they inherited the shape and the routine, even though the filling is different, and the word snus now often covers both tobacco and tobacco free pouches. That is the old naming habit at work once again, with a word stretching to cover a new product. For what actually happens once a pouch is in place, how does snus work explains it far better than a history page can.

Why Might Someone In Spain Never Have Heard Of Snus?

Snus is a Swedish habit, so it sits apart from Spain's own tobacco story, which centred on Seville's snuff mills. Snus rests under the lip, which makes it a Swedish format with a routine of its own. It also sits apart from the old powdered snuff of Seville, since one was sniffed and the other rests in the mouth.

If you are in Bilbao, Málaga or the Canary Islands and the history has made you curious, my suggestion is to keep three dates in mind: Seville in the 1500s, the moist Swedish turn in the early 1800s and the pouch in the 1970s. We deliver to Spain, and Klint snus is one place to see where two centuries of Swedish habit have ended up. When you browse, read the description on each can before anything else, and let the words tell you which branch of the family you are holding.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Royal Tobacco Factory
• Wikipedia, Snus
• Harm Reduction Journal (Rutqvist et al., 2011), via PubMed Central
• Wikipedia, Snuff (tobacco)
• Wikipedia, Jean Nicot