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Bulgaria just banned Siberia pouches — and told every courier firm to watch its parcels

Lab tests found the pouches contain tobacco, making them banned oral tobacco under EU law. 280 boxes were seized from courier shipments, and the consumer regulator has warned the country's entire courier industry.

PouchDaily Desk·
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Bulgaria's consumer protection regulator has banned one of the strongest snus brands in the world from the Bulgarian market — and put every courier company in the country on notice. The reason: lab tests found the pouches contain tobacco, which makes them illegal oral tobacco under EU law, whatever the label says.

What happened

The Commission for Consumer Protection (KZP), chaired by Maya Manolova, issued market-prohibition orders against products sold as "SIBERIA EXTREMELY STRONG" nicotine pouches, based on a commission decision from 2 October. The case started with a tip-off from the Customs Agency, which had checked a logistics centre and the warehouses of two courier firms — one large, one small.

Inside parcels sent to individuals this year, inspectors found 280 boxes of the pouches. Samples went to the Central Customs Laboratory, which found the products contain tobacco. That reclassifies them as tobacco for oral use — a category the EU Tobacco Products Directive prohibits from being sold anywhere in the union, and which Bulgaria's own tobacco law bans under Article 31. Two men, one from Gabrovo and one from Sofia, who handled the deliveries have been ordered to stop placing the products on the market.

KZP has also informed the Customs Agency that this type of product cannot legally be sold in Bulgaria and asked it to take further legal action against similar items.

Why it matters

Two things in this case reach well beyond Bulgaria:

  • The label doesn't decide the law. Siberia looks like a nicotine pouch and is often sold as one, but it's a snus product — it contains actual tobacco leaf. The lab result, not the marketing, settled its legal status. It's a clean illustration of a distinction that confuses consumers everywhere: tobacco-free nicotine pouches sit in a regulatory gray zone that most EU countries are now rushing to close, while tobacco-containing pouches have been banned EU-wide since 2016 and can only be sold in Sweden.
  • The courier channel is now a target. Where pouches can't be sold in shops, they get shipped — and regulators have noticed. KZP wrote to every courier firm in Bulgaria warning them not to help distribute banned products. Anyone running cross-border pouch delivery should read that as a signal of where enforcement is heading.

What's next

The Customs Agency has been asked to act against similar products, so expect more seizures if tobacco-containing pouches keep moving through Bulgarian parcel networks. And the wider backdrop is tightening fast: eight EU countries have asked Brussels to freeze the nicotine pouch market outright, and the European Parliament's health committee has backed plain packaging and flavour limits. Bulgaria's action is the strict end of that spectrum — products that contain tobacco aren't getting a new rule, they're getting the old one enforced.

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