Snus News from New York

In retrospect, I’m a little uncertain as to what the February 2012 snus meeting was about. Not that it wasn’t informative and fun, but last year’s meeting was pretty specific. My guess is that someone had excess budget they needed to burn, so they thought, “Hey we should do something for those blogger assholes.”

That’s just a guess.

To be clear, I don’t mean that the event was without a point, rather that there were several things going on at once. Here’s what I learned:

1. General 15-packs (Nordic Mint and Classic Blend) are going into 7 new markets. I don’t remember what they all were. A couple really big cities though… So this takes the total to 10 cities, along with with the existing ~3,000 stores total in Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia. I’m sure General Snus will make the announcement sometime soon.

2. Thanks to the partnership with Phillip Morris International, you can now find good snus in strange, far off places like Taiwan, Russia, Malaysia and Canada. Brands and flavors vary, although most are variations of General.

3. Kardus 2012 will not be Calvados. Very sad, but there you go.

4. I got a bunch of new snus to try. I haven’t cracked into them yet, but I will begin to do so in the coming days.

5. I think I’m the only person in the group who got on the subway. Dr. Snus is a man of the people. That’s not to say that I wasn’t concerned about the demonstrations by the strange blue-shirt-wearing hooligans that were inexplicably going on everywhere. But it shows you how bad the employment situation is in the region.

6. General Green Harvest may stop production in April due to limited tobacco supply. Stock up. I know I will. This is, in my opinion, one of the best snus ever made.

7. We taste tested single-region, non-flavored snus. I knew that tobacco from different places tasted differently, but I was surprised by how much different after the snus-making process. An interesting test you can do at home is with General White and General Green Harvest. The flavoring added to them is identical, I’m told. The difference is the tobacco.

Disclaimer: Swedish Match flew me to New York, put me up in a posh hotel, and wined and dined me so that I could write this blog.