The FDA Approved Cappuccino-Flavored Nicotine Pouches for Smokers. Teenagers Will Find Them First.

Cappuccino. Autumn Spice. Rich Berry. These are not flavors formulated for someone who has smoked two packs a day for twenty years and wants an off-ramp — they read like a coffee-shop menu. Yet these are exactly the flavors the FDA authorized this month for Helix Innovations’ “on!” nicotine pouches, bringing the total number of FDA-authorized nicotine pouch products to 30 nationwide, per Tobacco Reporter.

The agency didn’t do this on a whim. New nicotine products have to clear the premarket tobacco product pathway — in plain terms, a review where a manufacturer proves a new product is, on balance, better for public health than what’s already on shelves. Under that framework, the FDA’s logic holds: pouches carry fewer harmful constituents than cigarettes, so an adult smoker who switches completely comes out ahead. The agency even flags the catch — keep smoking while also pouching, and that benefit disappears.

THE TAKE: The FDA is regulating for the smoker it wants to convert and ignoring the teenager it’s about to create — a product doesn’t stay confined to the population its approval memo was written for.

Physicians are already watching that second population show up. CBS News reports that roughly 460,000 middle and high schoolers used nicotine pouches in the past year, making pouches the second most-used tobacco product among youth, trailing only e-cigarettes, with sales up about 250% between January 2023 and August 2025. Stanford’s Dr. Bonnie Halpern-Felsher put it plainly: “You’re changing your brain.” Dr. Brian King called the risk to nicotine-naive users “profound,” warning they can “get dependent and addicted.” Dr. Purnima Kumar said the gum recession pouch use causes is “irreversible.”

None of that shows up in a premarket authorization built around adult smokers who already have a habit to trade down from. The pathway has no mechanism for asking what a cappuccino-flavored pouch does to a fifteen-year-old who has never held a cigarette, because that was never the question it was designed to answer. It’s the question dependence answers on its own terms, sometimes over a decade, sometimes before anyone involved could legally buy the product. Holly Kurtz started vaping — a related nicotine product, not a pouch — at 17 and spent the next ten years unable to quit, Newsweek reported. She wasn’t chasing harm reduction. She was a kid who liked a flavor, and the habit outlasted the reason she started.

That’s the population missing from the FDA’s approval letter. For more on nicotine dependence and what it takes to actually recover from it, see our nicotine and tobacco resource.