Turning Point Brands, Inc. (TPB)
NYSE: TPB · Real-Time Price · USD
70.02
-2.15 (-2.98%)
Sep 15, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT - Market closed
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17th Annual Midwest IDEAS Conference

Aug 26, 2026

Summary

The company is aggressively expanding its modern oral nicotine brands, aiming for a 10% market share by the end of the decade through omni-channel growth, innovative products, and a multi-brand strategy. Financials show strong sales and EBITDA growth, with investments focused on scaling distribution and marketing.

Moderator

Hey, good afternoon. Our next presenting company is Turning Point Brands. Trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TPB. A frequent guest here at the IDEAS Conference, so we're glad to have them back. Doing the presentation today is Graham Purdy, the company's CEO. With him in the audience, Jamie Clement, the Director of IR. Is the correct title, right? Director? Yep.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Just call him Head of IR.

Moderator

Head of IR. Call it what you wish. If you've been at the presentations of Turning Point here in prior conferences, I think you're pleasantly surprised and pleased at the performance. Here to tell the story and hopefully keep that stock going higher is Graham.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Thanks, John. We even got a clock up here. My day started out really cool. I flew in last night, got up this morning , 6:30 A.M., to get ready. I got my suit on. Forming in the back, so bear with me. Standard disclaimers here, so I won't spend much time there. You've all seen them before. So a company overview. We're really going to talk about three distinctive areas here. Leveraging what we view as a proven playbook of building world-class brands, and specifically relative to where the company's going with our modern oral product. The positioning of the modern oral business within our company to capture what we've talked about, and I'll go to the punchline first, is we think this category is going to continue to grow. We think in 2025, it exited the market at about $5 billion.

We think it's going to at least $10 billion over the next several years, and our stated goal as a company is getting to a double-digit market share by the end of the decade. We read into that as $10 billion, 10%, $1 billion. As you think about, we'll talk a little bit later on in the presentation of how we think that we can ultimately get to that particular point. Then ultimately, our focused investments, how we're going to scale distribution, what our omni-channel approach is, and how we attack the market a little bit differently from our competitors. A quick overview of the company. It was founded in 1988. It was a spinoff in the old LBO days of Lehman. We bought the chewing tobacco brands from a company called Lorillard, most famous for Newport cigarettes. Headquartered in Louisville.

We're about $1.6 billion in market cap, somewhere in that zone today, maybe $1.7 billion, I don't know, based on today's price. Just shy of 500 employees in the company. We service about 265 retail bricks-and-mortar outlets in the United States. Think of that as, we don't have all of our products in all of those stores. We have a SKU or more of products in that many stores across the United States. Our net sales, $463 million, adjusted EBITDA of $120 million, as of 2025. If you switch to the right side of the screen, really have three distinctive properties across the company that makes us a little bit unique. We've got a heritage tobacco business under the brand Stoker's. We sell moist snuff, so think of that as those old round cans, chewing tobacco, the pouches, baseball players, old school, big dips. We've got that business.

We've had that business since the company was founded in 1988. We expanded in the early 2000s into moist snuff. We're currently the number one value-oriented player in that channel. In the middle section there, these are our two brand properties, which we're most excited about in terms of our future modern oral category, both FRĒ and Nu-X. We'll talk more about those brands towards the end of the presentation. We've also got a cannabis accessories or a cannabis-adjacent business under the brand Zig-Zag, one of the most iconic brands in the cannabis space. We're number one in the premium rolling paper market. We're the number one in the make-your-own cigar market. Think of that as the outer shell of a cigar, and what consumers may or may not choose to use that for.

We've got a number of different brands, both premium and some value-oriented brands, and we've carved out number one positions across various properties within the tobacco and cannabis business. Our competitive advantages. We've got a couple of things that really are the foundation of the company. We've got some great brands, and we ultimately have deep relationships. A lot of these customers, those 265,000 retail stores and the distributors, the thousand odd distributors that service those stores, we've been servicing for decades. We've got long relationships with these customers. If you think about a company that's been in business, we've been a trusted partner. The ability to bring new products to market for us is something that we've done consistently over the last several decades. We've got a multi-brand strategy, as we talked about before.

We do not have all of our eggs in one particular basket. We are fairly diversified within our portfolio. We have great agility to scale our business. We think about it, we have this legacy heritage business on one side of the equation that grinds along, but at the same time, we are able to be really agile and nimble. Similar to a startup company, and we will talk a little bit more about what that looks like in the context of our ALP business, as well as FRĒ. We are a little bit different than historical or legacy tobacco businesses or nicotine businesses, where we do not just focus on bricks-and-mortar stores. We have a robust online business. We sell to independent retail stores, we sell to chain accounts, and we also service distribution channels.

We really have the ability to touch the entire ecosystem to reach consumers with our products. We talked a little bit about the digital and direct-to-consumer capabilities. I think one of the things that really makes us unique and separated within this industry is the legacy companies that we compete against just do not have the same sort of building blocks of reaching consumers on a direct-to-consumer basis. You think about cigarette companies and their ability to market directly to consumers, it does not exist. That muscle memory inside those companies just is not there. Our company, on the other hand, has a heritage of selling direct to consumer. We understand the online channels in ways that our competitors do not. That is a major differentiator for our company.

I think what you have seen, at least since I took over in 2022, is a real discipline to our leverage profile and ultimately, growth in EBITDA. While this year has been somewhat of a challenge there as we have moved into an investment year, we certainly see sort of greenfield in the future in terms of earnings growth. We talked a little bit about the brands. You got Zig-Zag on the left. Think about that as sort of our cannabis adjacency business. What we do is we really service the flower in the industry, so things like rolling papers, things like cones, cigar wraps. We are a leader in a number of those particular segments. That is one vertical inside the company.

Stoker's in the center is really sort of the mainstay in the oral nicotine space for us, up until the launch of the right side of FRĒ and ALP, where we service both the chewing tobacco market as well as the moist snuff market. Interestingly enough, in the moist snuff market, if you think about our ability in modern oral and our aspirations to get to a double-digit market share, one of the things that gives us confidence is that when we launched our moist snuff back in the 2000s, we were a nothing business. It was already a well-established business with all of the same people that we are competing against in modern oral today. Philip Morris International bought Swedish Match. Swedish Match was a long-term competitor of ours. U.S. Smokeless Tobacco purchased Altria , a long-term competitor of ours with Copenhagen and Skoal.

BAT with Grizzly and some of their chewing tobacco properties with a business called Conwood that they bought, Grizzly, some of their chewing tobacco business. These are people that we have competed against for decades. We understand their playbook. We understand how they go to market. We launched our moist snuff in the early 2000s, and as of today, we are double-digit market share in store selling and approaching 10% of the market in the moist snuff category. We have been competing against these folks for a long time. We understand how they think, we understand how they operate. It gives us a lot of confidence in terms of what we think they are going to do and how ultimately we are going to compete inside that ecosystem. We launched our modern oral products.

Originally, we launched the FRĒ brand, really sort of dipped our toe in the water prior to 2024, just in the D2C space. We started going bricks-and-mortar in Q1 of 2024. Towards the end of 2024, we then codified a relationship where we have a joint venture with Tucker Carlson and the Tucker Carlson Network, and we have got a 50/50 JV under the brand ALP. Again, I think what is a little bit distinctive about us within the modern oral category is that we have multiple brand properties that we are creating in order to create two distinctive brand identities. It gives us the greatest opportunity to sweep the biggest net for consumers out in modern oral. If somebody does not align around what our FRĒ equities are, we have got the ALP property. If people do not align around the ALP equities, we have the FRĒ property.

We are really trying to take this multi-branded approach to give every consumer in this category, and that is going to come to this category, the opportunity to buy something from us. The rollout for that particular business, we have started D2C with both of the businesses. As we launched ALP or FRĒ into the bricks-and-mortar channel in Q1 of 2024, the FRĒ business started to grow in bricks-and-mortar. When we came in with ALP at the end of 2024, it was predominantly a focus on D2C. What makes that interesting for us is that if you think about the world of modern oral nicotine consumption in the U.S., something just less than 10% of the total market is sold in the D2C channel. By our estimates, and I think some of our other investors' estimates, we have about half of that market in the online channel.

If you think about our ability to get to 10% market share nationally in the most highly competitive market, which is D2C, where a consumer can spend time on the computer, they can go to the awful Reddit pages and look at comments that people are making about products in there. We are winning in the online environment. We think that we have got a great product that competes for the consumer. We have demonstrated proof of concept with that in our online channels, and we are now ramping that into bricks-and-mortar. We think that we have got a really good formula here to get to our aspirations. I will not spend too much time on Zig-Zag. We already talked about it. Rolling papers, you probably are familiar with the iconic brand there, the Zig-Zag orange rolling paper. We have also got cigar wraps.

Again, that's a deconstructed cigar, effectively, in either tobacco or hemp. We're number one in that particular market. We continue to build out additional properties that build the equities of Zig-Zag with new and innovative products like natural leaf wraps, and we've also gotten into the cigar business. Long history of Zig-Zag and something that we haven't forgotten about, but something that we've put a little bit on the back burner as we've shifted the company's focus to modern oral. We've talked a little bit about the evolution of the portfolio, getting into adjacencies like natural leaf. The cannabis industry is a little bit interesting. In the old days, when it was an illicit market, most of these products were sold through sort of the traditional channels of convenience stores.

That's changed over the years, where there's this whole pop-up industry of alternative shops, head shops, cannabis shops, and the business has moved a little bit more in that direction. As we've focused on modern oral, we've shifted more of our focus to the convenience stores. We think that there's a lot of pent-up demand for Zig-Zag, and we think that that brand has a lot of legs in the future. But right now, our focus is squarely on growing the modern oral category. Stoker's, we talked a bit about this. We launched in an innovative packaging size, so most of the industry is sold in 1.2-ounce cans, as represented by the one there in the middle, the Stoker's can in the middle. We came out with a 12-ounce tub to provide value to the consumer.

Lion's share of the large format category, we're about 60% of the market. We really have one principal competitor there, which is Philip Morris International with their Swedish Match acquisition. But we've demonstrated our ability to win with a unique packaging format in a highly competitive category. We launched our MST cans shortly after our tubs. We've been able to get into convenience stores with that product. We've got some legacy customers that now allow us the opportunity to bring additional products in behind that, and in chewing tobacco, we're the number one brand category with about 30% of the market. When I got here in 2022, we were about 6% of the market. The interesting thing about chewing tobacco, it's about a third of the size it was at its peak. It's as profitable as it was in its peak.

Most of the industry has shifted focus off of that. Our company has some interesting ways to focus in on certain niches and areas of the market to provide greater cash flow generation opportunities. Pretty proud about what we've been able to do with the legacy Stoker's brands. The way we think about this product is, it's a great cash flow generator for the company. We've continued to fuel marketing initiatives around it to keep the brand alive. We've launched some additional products like Stoker's Proud in the bottom left-hand corner there. Ultimately, we've been growing market share since we launched the product. Market share growth coupled with industry pricing has led to a business that's been a really nice grower for us over long term. Okay. I talked a little bit about this in the minutes. Here's really the meat of the presentation.

Modern oral started screaming onto the scene a few years ago. The way that this category, we think about in the future, is, are more people are going to smoke or continue to gravitate towards products that are more discreet. Obviously, things that they perceive as a little healthier. The category is about $5 billion in 2025. If you think about the total nicotine market, it is about a $50 billion market in the U.S. The lion's share of that is in cigarettes today. As cigarettes continue to decline and new consumers come into the category, people switch over from products that they perceive as a little more harmful. We think that the opportunity to get to $10 billion by the end of the decade is definitely within sight or within reach. If you think about how we stand today, in 2025, we have single-digit market share.

If you aggregate our online business with what we do in bricks-and-mortar, we think we are in around 5% market share of the market today. We are well on our way to getting to double-digit market share by the end of the decade. That has been by capturing outside share of the online market and then continuing to punch our way into bricks-and-mortar and grow share in the bricks-and-mortar environment. For us, I think what is different from us and our peer set is most of the companies that have any meaningful market share in this category are legacy cigarette companies. Modern oral represents a tiny percent of their total portfolio. If you think of the peers here, think of the large cigarette companies, between 3% and 5% of their revenue is encapsulated with modern oral. For us, it is 42%.

We have an outsized position in modern oral relative to the size of the company we are. We have more direct exposure to modern oral with investment in our company. We think as consumers continue to evolve and move into this category, we are really positioned well to capture more of those consumers as they come in. All right. The portfolio differentiation, we have two brand properties. The original was our FRĒ brand. We came out with a little bit of a unique proposition there. We were looking at what the white space in the category was at the time we launched in 2024. The things that were missing were, what were the trends in the European market? The consumer in the European market was gravitating towards a more moist pouch.

If you think about where the category started here in the U.S., it was basically all a ZYN. ZYN is a dry pouch. We came out with a moist pouch. ZYN came out offering consumer. We came out with 9 mg, 12 mg, 15 mg to provide a differentiated product, not only from a moisture standpoint, but also from a nicotine perspective, to give us a reason for being out in the market. When we are going to talk to customers, why bring us in? We offer something a little bit different to the consumer. That was the original launch with FRĒ. We have since backed up the FRĒ portfolio with the broadest range of nicotines. We now have 3 mg, 6 mg, 9 mg, 12 mg, and 15 mg. At the end of 2024, I met with Tucker Carlson.

He was on a warpath, given some history that he had with one of the large tobacco companies that he was doing some free pro bono work for. We created this relationship with Tucker Carlson, this 50/50 JV, and we decided to launch ALP and go after the heart of the market, which was the lower milligram strength. When we launched ALP, we launched in 3 mg, 6 mg, and 9 mg formats, principally online to the consumer. If you think about the two different brand properties between FRĒ and ALP. On the ALP side of the equation, I think of it as somewhat of an irreverent consumer that values independence. It is the everyday consumer. On the right side of the equation with FRĒ, it is high octane, performance-oriented.

You will see in some of the later slides here, some of the work that we have done between those two brand properties to create that differentiation between the two brands. All right. You got really two sides of the equation when it comes to the strategic growth priorities of the business. On one hand, you got to have awareness. You got to build awareness. I think that that is the area where the company is spending a lot of time with our marketing investments, is growing our awareness. What we have seen is that there is somewhat of a direct correlation between what our awareness is with the consumer, aided and unaided, and what our ultimate market shares are. We have spent a lot of time and a lot of investment on the marketing side of the house in order to create a greater awareness for our two brands.

At the same time, it is not just to create awareness. When you create that awareness, you have to have a place to buy it. We have also spent on the sales side of the equation, we have sort of ramped up our spending to get into more chain accounts to make the products more ubiquitously distributed so you can connect that awareness build with point of purchase. Ultimately, it is bringing those two things together. On the marketing side of the equation, it is really a funnel. If you think about it is awareness, it is interest, consideration, then ultimately driving to purchase. If you think about those four different areas, the product recognition with FRĒ in Q2 of this year, we codified a relationship with UFC, PBR, NASCAR.

We have really leaned into high-performance, high-octane brand properties that have a high incidence rate of the usage of this product. We have made that direct connect. If you are a UFC fan, you have probably seen on the mat, and we have got our FRĒ logo on the UFC mat. We are leaning into the different properties to sort of reinforce those equities. At the same time, we are building an engagement level with the consumer, with our convenience store expansion, getting on more shelves. That has been a function of adding more salespeople over time. In 2025, we doubled the size of our sales force. In 2026, we project a 50% increase on our sales force. A lot of that wood has been chopped, frankly, and we feel pretty good about where our sales force is now.

We've had to invest heavily in our sales force because it's not just good enough to get into the store. You got to be in there and you got to service that account, because if you go into a store one time and you're not there for an entire year, the degradation of your set is substantial and happens very quickly. We think that that's a distinct advantage for our company. We also have broad merchandising support, so things like displays, signage, and what have you, to connect those dots with the different equities that we're building. Then ultimately, we're driving product purchase through point-of-sale activity, mobile coupons, loyalty programs, some minor promotion here and there with our customers. We're not only building awareness, but also trying to connect at the point of purchase for the consumer to buy our products. All right.

Accelerating the momentum and chain distribution. This has been an area that the company historically hasn't played, which is in the large convenience store formats. The large convenience stores, the environment today is you have to pay slotting fees to get on the shelf of those convenience stores. We've been engaged with a number of large chain convenience partners. This year, we had a number of wins. We told the Street this year that we would be adding about 70% increase to distribution in our chain account environment, and that's ultimately the drive to ubiquity. The interesting aspect of the nicotine consumer in convenience is they generally have two to three stores in their decision set. If they're buying one package at a time, you're always susceptible if you're not in that other store.

For us, scaling distribution and getting to a ubiquitous state so we're not constantly having to resell that consumer every time they go in the store is key. We've made a large investment to ramp up our distribution activities in chain convenience stores. On to the financial performance of the company. You can see on the left-hand side the net sales growth of the company from 2023 at $325 million to 2025 up to $463 million. Gross profit, you can see both the dollars and the margin there. The margin has been relatively stable at about 57%, but with substantial increase in gross margin dollars. As of last year, we were $120 million in EBITDA, and on the right side, you can see the leverage profile of the company since 2023 from 2.7x down to less than one turn.

The modern oral is really the big driver here. Q2 growth year-over-year was 128%. The CAGR since Q1 of 2025 has been 140%. You can see really nice growth, a little acceleration there in Q2 of 2025. I think what drove the growth in Q2 of 2025 is we converted out from principally an online business, and we added out to our sales force's bag. Our sales force is now going down the street and not only selling FRĒ into bricks-and-mortar, but they started selling out into bricks-and-mortar. You saw a nice translation there from the activity of what we did to conversion in terms of net sales. Look, I think the summary here is we've got a history of competing against these large competitors. We're competing against all the same people that we've historically competed against.

We know how they think. We understand where the soft spots and the white space is when we compete against them. We see the exposure to white pouch as a company is big, obviously, for us in context, and we think that ultimately with the heritage brands to fund the future growth and the size of the category growing and the playbook that we've laid down to date, getting to about 5% market share bodes well for us to achieve those 10% results at the end of the decade. We talked a little bit about, here's what the investment curve ultimately looks like when you're thinking about adding the chain accounts. There's an upfront cost to these chains to pay for slotting. You've got a large upfront payment, and then as over time, you start leveraging that payment with growth in the store.

Some of that payment is transient, so you're not paying that over and over again. It's one time, and it's upfront. Ultimately, as we continue to grow our brands, that level of investment and cost in getting those chains will decrease over time. As we grow inside those stores, you'll start seeing the leverage flow through. Today, we outsource our product to India. Not a great environment. Given the fast growth of the category, we've had to air freight most everything that we've brought into the U.S., substantial cost per can. We also pay a manufacturing margin on top of that. There's been an Indian tariff. As we get through the regulatory environment, and we move to domestic production, we see that our gross margin potential for this category will be in the 70% range. We talked a little bit about this.

We're leveraging our playbook. We've got a portfolio of great existing brands. We're building two, we think, powerhouses in both FRĒ and ALP. The modern oral business for us, frankly, sky's the limit in terms of how big the category gets. Whether it's $10 billion or $20 billion, $30 billion, who knows? If all of the cigarette volume eventually moves over to modern oral, it'll be something much larger than $10 billion. We're sort of on that pert line right now to getting to that double-digit market share growth by the end of the decade. You can pin a number, how big's the category going to be? Will we get to 10%, 70% margins? We think that there's sort of a bright future for us from an EBITDA perspective. Our investments are not made willy-nilly.

Everything that we do, we're very mindful of what the return on that dollar is. Not each dollar has the same return profile. Ultimately, the spending that we're laying down outside of shipping, which is an SG&A, is cost that we can throttle in one direction or the other. We're being very mindful of, ultimately, what the impact of the investment is on the income statement. I think we're pretty well positioned at this point in time, with what we're spending today to achieve that growth profile. That's it. I packed a lot in there. I'm happy to take questions from the group. Go ahead, George.

Speaker 3

Graham, if you maintain the share that you have based off your D2C online, and it grows with the market, based off of the current same store sales share that you have for each of the brands.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Including D2C?

Speaker 3

No.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

If D2C stays.

Speaker 3

If D2C just maintains its current share and grows with the market.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yep.

Speaker 3

No change in the share.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yep.

Speaker 3

But then you maintain the same store-level share that you have for both ALP and FRĒ.

What level of penetration do you have to get to reach your 10%, in terms of incremental stores?

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yeah. These products are sold, as you know, in about 200,000 stores in the U.S. If you were to scrape through our website, you can divine where our distribution levels are today. We still have a lot of wood to chop. I would think that we probably have to double our store counts from here. Somewhere in that neighborhood to get there.

Speaker 3

That would get you to the 10%.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Again, all things equal in terms of the trajectory in the current stores that we're in, as well as some stability with the online business. Yeah.

Jamie Clement
Head of IR, Turning Point Brands

Also, George, we'll see how ALP performs as it gets more penetration in D2C, because an ALP store may not be equal to a FRĒ store.

Speaker 3

I'm a little new to the story, but

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Sorry for the drink from the fire hose. Long story. It was an investor deck that we just updated, so I apologize for wheeling through that so fast.

Speaker 3

That's fine. But a friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a long time, he's also using these pouches. Did this thing just explode in recent history, a couple, three years ago?

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yeah. It's been a little longer than that it's been around. I think one of the big impetuses of the exponential growth that we've seen over the last few years was in 2019, the FDA effectively killed the vape pod systems. So this was really the next alternative that was out there. So I think that was one of the stimulants that created it. And I think nicotine is sort of a pack animal environment, where as consumers start seeing, like you've seen, this friend of yours, you might be now apt to try it just by virtue of seeing your

Speaker 3

Maybe.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Well, maybe. Some people would.

Speaker 3

Sure.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

You started seeing these show up in frat houses years ago, so it's an interesting category because I could have two pouches in right now. You'd never know that I've got them in.

So it's very discreet. It's an activity that people don't have to be embarrassed by. So I think that you add the continuum of risk, which is cigarettes, not so good. Everything but cigarettes, definitely better on that continuum of risk. There are some signs that this is at sort of the other complete opposite end of that. Look, consumers enjoy nicotine. It's sort of small pleasures that are affordable for consumers. I think you're always going to have a portion of the population that's going to consume nicotine, and the real question is, if that's true, what types of products are they going to use? I don't think there will be more smoking in the future.

If you assume that nicotine will continue to be something that's here to stay, it's a pretty good bet that the category will continue to move towards products like these.

Jamie Clement
Head of IR, Turning Point Brands

Also, I don't think there's any evidence that COVID was any driver of nicotine pouch adoption, but I do think your perception that there's an explosion recently, and part of it was, I think some people were picking it up during COVID, naturally, all of a sudden get back, "Oh, I didn't know you use this," "Oh, I didn't know you use this." All of a sudden it looks like something's exploding. That's my personal take.

Speaker 3

All at the MST , I mean, these studies, they're not getting lung cancer. They're getting mouth cancer. How does that-

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yeah. Obviously, I can't comment on the health aspects of these products. What I can say is the FDA has authorized a few brands in this category, and those brands have obviously gone through rigorous review with a lot of scientific studies, everything from blood work to extended abuse liability studies. I think by virtue of the FDA acknowledging that these products are okay to be on the market is probably a decent indicator for the answer to that question.

Jamie Clement
Head of IR, Turning Point Brands

We're very limited in what we can say about that, just so you know.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Okay.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

I'd love to say more.

Jamie Clement
Head of IR, Turning Point Brands

Yeah, particularly while our products are pending.

Speaker 3

The product's been around in Sweden for longer than in the U.S., correct?

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Is there any formulation differences or what product, or literally was it sort of like they took the product from there and kind of brought it here?

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yeah. Sweden's an interesting ecosystem. I was talking to one investor earlier today. I am not for socialized medicine. Sweden's one area where the byproduct of the social medicine sort of worked because they were trying to get consumers off of cigarettes, so they jacked the prices of cigarettes up, and they encouraged consumers to use these types of products, snus, and what have you. You see almost the entire Swedish market is almost no cigarette smoking, and it is all usage of these types of products. I think that they would tell you that these products are a lot better for a consumer than smoking a cigarette.

Jamie Clement
Head of IR, Turning Point Brands

Real quick, to answer your question. You asked about formulation. By and large, your European products are going to be more moist than your average American product, although that is changing, and the nicotine strength level tends to be higher over there.

Speaker 3

Has that helped the FDA's assessments, having more data points from another country where it has been in the market longer, that kind of thing, or not?

Jamie Clement
Head of IR, Turning Point Brands

It is hard to know.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

It's hard to know, but the first authorization that came in this category was from Philip Morris International, which was, they purchased Swedish Match. I suspect that they have had some interesting data in their application. I don't know that for a fact, but they certainly have a long history in this category.

Speaker 3

The pouches are relatively similar in terms of from one competitor to the next.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yes.

Speaker 3

Has ZYN had an approval to be marketed as being a safer alternative to cigarettes?

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

It has.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yeah. It is not just ZYN. Copenhagen also got the, which is the loose tobacco product, got an MRTP, which is a modified risk tobacco product. There has been some acknowledgement from the agency that these products are certainly different than some of the other products that are on the market.

Speaker 3

You show in your slide deck $50 billion market.

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

The nicotine TAM in the U.S., yeah.

Speaker 3

Of total nicotine. How much of it is not combustible, and what has been the growth rate in general? Not just talking pouch, but just trying to understand how that evolves and is there any world where volumes have been coming down for a long time on combustibles. Is there a world anywhere near term where overall volumes for the nicotine category could stabilize?

Graham Purdy
CEO, Turning Point Brands

Yeah. So what's interesting is over the last 50 years, consumption as a percentage of population has come in. The tobacco companies, not us, the large tobacco companies, have been really genius about managing volume declines with price increases. The business has stayed large and robust, so the cigarette companies today are selling about a third of the cigarettes they were selling in 1983, and they are way more profitable today than they were back in 1983. I think that it's not just a function of volume, but it's also a function of who owns pricing in this category. At this moment in time, this category, modern oral category, is dominated by the large cigarette companies that have a historic playbook with managing profitability. Cigarette smoking has come in