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Swedish Match now checks ID on every sale in its own stores — and wants buying for minors banned

No more guessing who looks 18: Sweden's biggest snus seller checks ID on every customer, after test purchases found most young-looking buyers were never asked.

Pouchnews Desk·
SwedenSwedish Matchage verificationregulationZYNPMI

From today, buying snus or any other nicotine product in Swedish Match's own Swedish stores means showing ID — every customer, every time, regardless of how old they look. The company is also calling for something Swedish law doesn't currently have: a ban on buying nicotine products for someone under 18, the same way buying alcohol for a minor is illegal.

The change sounds small, but it targets a real gap. Swedish law already requires anyone selling tobacco and nicotine products to make sure the buyer is 18. In practice, that usually means a staff member decides whether a customer looks old enough to skip the ID check. Swedish Match says that creates uncertainty and means the rules get applied differently from store to store.

The company isn't acting on a hunch. A 2025 test-purchase survey run by the Swedish snus manufacturers' association (Snustillverkarföreningen) sent young adults who look younger than 18 into stores across the country to try to buy nicotine products. In more than half of the test purchases, nobody asked for ID.

"We shouldn't guess. We should know"

That's the line from Erick Barbor, Swedish Match's country manager for Sweden, in the company's announcement. He points to alcohol as the model: hard age checks at purchase are something most people already accept, and nicotine should work the same way.

Store checks are described as a first step. Swedish Match says it wants to introduce technical solutions later that make the verification even more secure — following the broader industry shift toward digital age verification that is also reshaping how pouches are sold online in the UK and elsewhere.

The second half of the push is proxy purchasing, or "langning": adults buying nicotine products and handing them to under-18s. Barbor argues that in-store checks alone won't fix the problem, because many minors get their nicotine that way. In Sweden, buying alcohol for a minor is a criminal offence; the company wants the same principle applied to nicotine products.

Why it matters beyond Swedish Match

Swedish Match, part of Philip Morris International since 2022, is the dominant name in Swedish snus and behind the ZYN pouch brand. When the biggest seller in the country unilaterally tightens its own purchase rules and lobbies for a proxy-purchase ban, it sets a benchmark other retailers get compared against — and it hands Swedish regulators a ready-made template at a time when the EU debate over tighter nicotine rules is heating up.

For readers comparing brands and prices, PouchFinder lists ZYN's range.

SOURCES