Swedish Match now cards everyone in its own stores — and wants proxy buying banned
Since October 1, every customer buying snus or nicotine pouches in Swedish Match's own Swedish stores must show ID. The ZYN owner wants Sweden to go further and ban buying nicotine for minors outright.
Swedish Match has stopped guessing who's 18. Since October 1, every customer in the company's own Swedish stores has to show ID before buying snus or any other nicotine product — no matter how old they look.
What happened
Swedish law already requires sellers to make sure nicotine buyers are 18. In practice, that usually means staff decide whether someone looks old enough to skip the check, and the company says that produces inconsistent enforcement from store to store.
The company's Sweden chief Erick Barbor put it simply: "We shall not guess. We shall know." He compared the approach to alcohol, where strict ID checks are already accepted as normal.
Swedish Match also pointed to test-purchase research run by the Snustillverkarföreningen (the Swedish snus manufacturers' association) during 2025: young adults who look under 18 tried buying nicotine products in stores across the country, and in more than half of the attempts they were not asked for ID at all.
Why it matters
This is the maker of ZYN voluntarily going harder on age checks than Swedish law requires — and it is not doing it out of pure goodwill. The company wants two things from regulators: a legal ban on buying nicotine products for minors (like Sweden's existing proxy-purchase ban for alcohol), and eventually technical age-verification at the point of sale.
The context is a country where nicotine pouches have become the newest front in the youth-nicotine debate. Swedish Match's move is an attempt to get ahead of it: if the industry can show strict age controls, it weakens the case for blunt restrictions. Watch whether other Swedish retailers match the policy, and whether the Riksdag picks up the proxy-purchase proposal — that would be the first concrete regulatory outcome of this push.
The company has been owned by Philip Morris International since 2022, so any policy proven in Sweden tends to travel to other markets where ZYN is sold.
Compare ZYN and other nicotine pouches across retailers at PouchFinder.
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