The nicotine set is a margin fixture, not a flavor story
Pouches and cigarettes do not share a planogram or a gross-margin line.
July 22, 2026 — Convenience chains that still talk about “tobacco” as one category are describing a fixture the store no longer has. Cigarettes, moist, vapor, and nicotine pouches turn on different rules, different ages, and different unit margins. A buyer who resets them as one set will miss which one paid the quarter.
When the public filers report, the sentence to keep is the one that names the growing nicotine product and the one that names the resurgence, if any, in cigarettes. Those are not the same customer and not the same compliance file. State flavor rules still decide what can sit on the fixture after the release is forgotten.
This desk will read those lines against the states a chain actually operates. A national flavor claim that ignores the statute is not a category story.