Snus Tour: Factories and Snus Making

As it turned out, forgetting my camera wasn’t too big of a deal as far as snus pics go. When our factory tour leader — a woman who stood no more than 5′ tall — showed up, she told us we couldn’t take any pictures inside the place. Quite frankly, the way she bossed us around was pretty intimidating. I mostly stayed out of trouble from her, except when I said “You can smell the rape in the air” near the batch of GR N. 2.

The company is pretty secretive. In fact, a local reporter who wanted to interview us couldn’t get cleared to enter the place. But that was cool with me. I was so jet lagged the first day and so hungover the second day… perhaps more on that later.

However, even if I had detailed videos of the whole place, I don’t know anyone that could reverse engineer, say, General Onyx. I guess someone out there might be able to, though.

So Swedish Match has two factories. The first one is downtown, the other is in the country. The first is pretty old, the second is pretty new. The first one makes loose and original snus, the second makes white portions. I imagine the first as a barber shop, the second as an operating room.

At each factory, we were able to see — as far as I can reckon — the whole snus making process, more or less. I’m happy to report that it looked good to me. Here’s Chad’s pic of the newer snus factory.

It surprise me how much snus got thrown out. At nearly every step, some test was being done on the product. For example, the star formation machine scans the tin after the snus is supposed to be in place. If one little portion is slightly off kilter, the whole tin gets tossed in the bin. This is probably cleaner and cheaper than some factory worker pushing it back down with his thumb.

Cheaper? I’ve always figured snus is pretty inexpensive to make… once you have the machine, of course. Well, here’s some extremely imprecise math to help illustrate. Again, this is just an estimate. In fact, just an estimate of the tobacco content — not anything else.

Tobacco is stored at the new factory. They had some nine months of tobacco in there — a couple hundred million tins of snus worth, give or take. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes or 200 kg of tobacco. Someone asked what one of those cost. The answer was something like, about 10,000 crowns but it changes depending on all sorts of factors such as the weather, demand, etc.

We also learned that the tobacco in the boxes had about 10% water. So, 200,000 grams at 10% water is 180,000 grams of dry tobacco. Let’s assume that snus is 50% water and 50% tobacco (it’s close). That means we get 360,000 grams of snus from one box. That’s 15,000 tins of 24 grams. 10,000 crowns/ 15,000 tins = .66 crowns. At current exchange rates, that’s about 8.5 cents worth of tobacco.

Again, it’s a very rough number and it doesn’t account for a lot of stuff, like water, electricity, flavoring, plastic tins, labels, portion material, factory workers, trips for world-famous snus bloggers, etc. etc. Also, I think this is a high-end number (for the tobacco) as snus also contains some part tobacco stem (who knows how much?), which has got to cost less than leaf. As nicotine content varies in a leaf, adding stem can get it to the right level.

You probably know that there are a lot of different types of tobacco. What type of tobacco do they use? All kinds. The biggest thing they look for is super-low levels of bad chemicals that you can find in tobacco. The second most important thing was “quality.” Although kind of vague, it seemed to me to mean the general sexiness of the leaf. I don’t know. The impression I got was that specific types of plants, where it comes from, and where on the plant it comes from don’t matter as the snus making process nukes the nuance out anyway. Of course, the tobacco is all air and sun cured — as opposed to fire cured — as fire introduces nasty shit you don’t want to put in your face.

This is already past my personal TLDR length, so we’ll call that the end of the factory descriptions unless I think of something Earth shattering to share. Next time, we’ll go into some of the interesting people we got to speak to.