Cigarette-branded swag has long been the cool kid apparel of choice – walk a block of any artsy neighborhood in the US, and you’ll probably peep a red Marlboro baseball cap or green-and-white striped Newport fanny pack. For the latest form of nicotine promotion that concerns parents and public health advocates, check out Zyn’s reward program.
The flavored nicotine pouch has become a gen Z status symbol, with Fortune reporting that users are hoarding Zyn containers, which come emblazoned with QR codes that can be used to collect points – 15 points per can, up to 60 points per month. Redeeming these points on Zyn’s website unlocks items like iPads, Dyson Airwraps, KitchenAid mixers, and Tory Burch tote bags.
“I feel like a kid in an arcade who’s getting all their tickets, and they’re going to earn a prize,” Dani Darlene, a 24-year-old personal trainer, told Fortune about her rewards account. Darlene doesn’t use Zyn, but her husband does … and it appears that wives of users are big fans of the incentive.
In one TikTok with nearly 900,000 likes, a young woman holds a stack of 19 white-and-blue Zyn packs. “This is for the girlies who can relate: if you know what these are you probably have a boyfriend who’s addicted but doesn’t wanna admit it,” she says. “These used to annoy the shit out of me, laying everywhere, collecting dust … He goes through them like literal crack.” She adds that she’s saving up for 1,500 points, which gets an Amazon gift card.
Ostensibly, tobacco-free nicotine pouches such as Zyn aim to help cigarette smokers ages 21 or over kick their habit. Users place a pouch in between their lips and gums, where it releases nicotine into the bloodstream. But the smokeless design and popularity of Zyn on social media – in no small part due to its rewards program – mean that younger non-smokers are trying the packs as well.
CNN reported that Philip Morris International, which owns Zyn, shipped 350m cans of pouches last year, a 62% increase in the US compared with 2022. It’s earned the skepticism of the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who has called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate Zyn’s health impact on and apparent marketing toward young people. “I’m delivering a warning to parents, because these nicotine pouches seem to lock their sights on young kids – teenagers, and even lower – and then use the social media to hook ’em,” Schumer said in January.
Neither TikTok, Meta, nor X allow for paid promotion from the nicotine industry, but there are easy workarounds for this, according to Dr Robert K Jackler, a professor at Stanford Medicine and principal investigator at Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising. “We saw Juul use hashtag amplification tremendously, getting users to put up posts with #MothersDay or #Party, or whatever,” he said. Now, it’s “Zynfluencers”, or those who unofficially rep the brand on social media. “There’s free organic marketing,” Jackler said.
Philip Morris International told Fortune that Zyn’s online advertising and rewards program were only directed at legal nicotine users, age 21 and older. Its marketing application for Zyn is under review by the FDA.
Reward programs are federally legal for tobacco products, so long as the program doesn’t reward users with more tobacco. Marlboro, which is owned by Philip Morris USA, has a program similar to Zyn’s that doles out Apple AirTags and Visa gift cards to those who purchase enough cigarettes. Users can also win Zippo lighters, custom Swiss army knives, and Yeti tumblers. If Zyn’s reward program woos the disgruntled wives and girlfriends of straight male customers, then Marlboro’s reward program, true to its cowboy origin story, hooks its chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking, male users.
Cigarette reward programs go back to at least the 1950s, when Raleigh Cigarettes issued coupons in every box, which could be used to shop its catalog for items like home goods and jewelry. Lauren Czaplicki, an associate scientist at the Institute for Global Tobacco Control at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the Zyn rewards program reminds her of Camel Cash, which was introduced in 1991. Also known as C-notes, the fake money came in Camel cigarette boxes and could be exchanged for promotional swag.
“The kids wearing this merchandise were walking Camel ads,” Czaplicki said. And some of them were not of legal smoking age: one 1995 study in the journal Tobacco Control found that “whether or not it is [Camel’s] intention, some underage smokers are illegally purchasing Camel cigarettes specifically to collect Camel cash”.
(A case study for current Zyn-heads: Camel Cash expired in 2007. Some diehards who spent years hoarding C-notes alleged they were suddenly left with piles of useless paper, with no warning. In a 2016 class-action settlement, Camel’s parent company agreed to reactivate the Camel Cash program for six months and allowed customers to redeem thousands in C-note vouchers, as well as cover over $4.8m in attorneys’ fees and costs.)
Branded merch from cigarette and tobacco companies is now prohibited by the FDA – and Philip Morris says it no longer sells Zyn-branded swag, though Zynfluencers are still able to scoop it up on second-hand retail sites like eBay. “But the proliferation of social media posts on Zyn’s rewards program functions in the same way,” said Czaplicki. “You see people showing their prizes alongside packs of Zyn or even just showing the stacks of empty Zyn packs that they are going to redeem. This is free advertising for the company.”
It’s the gamification of nicotine use, according to Czaplicki. “The viral buzz and high value prizes really drive purchasing and consumption, which is worrying,” she said. “Then you have the potential for people to get addicted to the product and to playing the rewards program game, and the two mutually reinforce each other.”
