Opinion
“I continue to wonder if this is the beginning of the end of combustible cigarettes,” Wells Fargo’s Bonnie Herzog recently mused. At first glance, the Technomic numbers suggest otherwise—90% of tobacco consumers listed cigarettes as their most-bought tobacco product, and less than 50% cared about seeing more variety in smokeless, e-vapor or the tobacco category as a whole. But it’s a different story when you factor in age: Of those tobacco consumers ages 18 to 34, 60% said they wanted more e-vapor options in c-stores (vs. just 30% of those over 35) and 63% wanted a more robust tobacco category overall (vs. 39% over 35). So we millennials may be the ones who carry through Herzog’s prediction about the end of combustibles, or at least bring on the dawn of the total nicotine category.—Melissa Vonder Haar
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