Twista Lime, Kauai Kolada, Caribbean Chill, Mintrigue. Exotic cigarette flavors like those were banned in 2009 out of concern they might tempt young people.
But the flavors tobacco companies once sold look like plain vanilla compared with the flavor buffet now on offer — legally — by the fast-growing electronic cigarette industry.
News on Tuesday that Reynolds American had agreed to buy Lorillard, uniting two of the nation’s biggest tobacco companies, highlighted how important e-cigarettes have become to the declining tobacco industry. Both Reynolds and Lorillard have pushed hard into e-cigarettes, which offer a new way of delivering a puff of nicotine.
For now, those companies’ flavors are relatively modest, though they may feel pressure to expand into the explosion of competition for the consumer palate, with e-cigarette flavors such as banana cream pie and cotton candy.
Across the e-cigarette industry, more than 7,000 flavors are now available and, by one estimate, nearly 250 more are being introduced every month. The array of tastes goes far beyond anything cigarette companies ever tried.
A technician filling bottles with the flavored nicotine-laced liquid for electronic cigarettes at a plant in Miami.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Flavors have become central to the conversation because e-cigarette makers say that the rainbow of tastes differentiates them from deadly cigarettes.
But the claim that e-cigarette flavors won’t attract children has prompted an outcry from some policy makers, who say consumers have been down this road before with tobacco. Federal health authorities have outlawed most cigarette flavorings except menthol, arguing that they lure the young into nicotine addiction. While the Food and Drug Administration has proposed regulations for e-cigarettes, it has not limited marketing or flavors, which the agency is studying.
At a Senate committee hearing in late June, lawmakers denounced manufacturers for marketing practices that they said appealed to children, including the embrace of flavors that are forbidden in ordinary cigarettes.Jason Healy, the president of Blu eCigs, told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that the average age of people using cherry flavored e-cigarettes, for example, was 40. Such flavors “decrease the ability or possibility of adult users who use e-cigs switching back” to cigarettes, he said. Blu eCigs, a subsidiary of Lorillard, is being sold to the British company Imperial as part of the deal announced on Tuesday. Lorillard and Reynolds said they would focus their e-cigarette efforts on Reynolds’ product Vuse, which in June was introduced in 15,000 stores nationwide.
For now, Vuse has only two flavors, original cigarette flavor and menthol, but the market is changing quickly as evidenced by the experience of other leading e-cigarette companies. Most notable is the experience of NJOY, which has turned to flavors to help stanch plummeting market share.
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