Snus Tour: Snus School

This part of the series on my trip to Gothenburg is about the presentations Swedish Match gave. There were 4 that I haven’t yet discussed, all quite interesting.

The first was done by Connie Andersson who is the tobacco and flavor guy. I just googled him and his title says “Product Specialist” on linkdin, so there you go. He’s the guy who makes Kardus, and probably all our favorite snus. He also wore red pants. If there were a snus superhero, it just might be him.

Conny had us smell a bunch of snus and then make our own. I made some pretty good snus (garlic lime) and pretty horrible snus (herb honey rum). The honey rum was decent, but the herbs made it weird… No matter.

I captured Conny’s snus flavor travel kit in one of the two pictures I took while in Sweden (with my camera phone):

The other is Chad reporting his luggage lost to SAS:

Chad (at the fartherst window) was only without his luggage until Friday evening…We were about to go get him red pants like Conny’s when his bags showed up.

One interesting tidbit was the price of some of the flavorings used is out of this world. The rose oil they use in Grov, I heard, costs something like $500 a vial. They probably don’t use much.

I also talked to Conny extensively while we were both quite hammered and I think we hatched a plan to take over the world. It was a good plan, I think, but I forget the details.

The second class of Swedish Match’s snus school was this guy named Nik Krohn, who I recognized from the last IPCPR in New Orleans. He’s a brand marketer and he told us about the user profiles for the four most important brands to the company: General, Ettan, G-Rape and Catch. I was experiencing a severe hangover at this point. But I do recall something about: General users are douchebags, G-Rape users are hipsters, Ettan users are hillbillies and Catch users are smokers.

OK, that’s not exactly what he said. But if you replace my dysphemisms with euphemisms, we’re about there. He said that their research showed these user profiles to be quite accurate. I wanted to ask him about my favorite, Roda, but I worried he’d say it’s for lady boys. I did ask him, however, how they communicated with their users.

The answer:

The tin.

I knew they couldn’t make commercials for snus, but it occured to me they might be able to make them for Onico. I asked and they, indeed, could. There aren’t any currently running on TV, but I found some older ones that seem legit.

Here they are:

At this point we ate lunch. I think it saved my life. I hadn’t really drank like that in well over a year. It was 3AM and the sun was coming up when we left the club. I slept through my alarm. Markus had to call me a half a dozen times to get my ass out of bed…

Re-energized, we met up with a guy named Bengt Börjesson. He buys tobacco. Sounds easy right? Well, there’s a hell of a lot involved. I wish I took notes as he had a killer flow chart. Basically, the process is filled with quality checks throughout — basically checking to make sure there’s no nasty shit. Bengt flies around the world to check out the farms and tobacco samples get analyzed for bad shit at every turn.

One interesting thing my beer-soaked brain recalls was that they buy from two tobacco growing conglomerates. Why? Good question. Well, if they refuse a big batch, these two companies take the product back no problem and can find something else to do with it. Smaller companies apparently don’t have the capacity to pull that switcharoo off every time. I suspect the rejected tobacco probably goes to make Marlboros in Kazakhstan.

There was one more presentation. It was my favorite and will be the subject of my next post unless I get a bug up my ass about something or there’s some breaking news story…

Like this Street Fighter 2 Guile version of G-Rape:

Action Figure not included.