What started as a baseball-dugout alternative to dip back in 2009 has become a wellness-scene accessory, an office substitute for the third cup of coffee, and — to a growing group of researchers — a public-health question with no federal floor under it.
A USA Today report this week captured the inflection point: at Othership Flatiron, the Manhattan sauna-and-cold-plunge space that has become an Instagram fixture for New York’s wellness set, nearly a hundred saunagoers rotated between 32-degree plunges and a cedar sauna with small white pouches tucked between their gums and lips. They weren’t nicotine pouches. The event was hosted by Wip, a caffeine-pouch startup that launched in June 2025 and says it has sold more than two million cans in its first year across 6,500 retail doors.
The category that didn’t exist five years ago
The modern caffeine pouch traces back to Grinds, a 2009 coffee-filled oral pouch marketed to baseball players as a tobacco alternative. The category sat quiet for a decade. Then came the Zyn surge — by January 2025, Zyn was the first and only nicotine pouch authorized by the FDA, and the form factor had a national audience. Tobacco-alternative companies including Smokey Mountain Chew added caffeine pouches to their lineups, and a wave of 2024 and 2025 brand launches pulled the format into wellness positioning, fitness positioning, and office positioning all at once.
The pouches sold today range from 50 milligrams to 225 milligrams of caffeine. For reference, a 12-ounce coffee has about 136mg and a Red Bull has 114mg. The FDA’s general daily-intake guidance is 400mg. A single high-dose pouch can deliver more than half of that limit in one go, and TikTok videos show users stacking two and three at a time.
Why researchers are watching
Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, a Stanford pediatrics professor who studies adolescent substance use, told USA Today the appeal of pouches to younger users is exactly their discreetness. There is no federal age restriction on caffeine products, meaning a 15-year-old can buy a 200mg pouch with no friction at all. She said she now regularly fields questions from educators and parents who have noticed students using them.
The pharmacology is part of the concern. Rob van Dam, a George Washington University public-health professor who studies caffeine, told USA Today that drinks take time to absorb through the digestive system. A pouch held between the gum and cheek delivers caffeine via the oral mucosa, which is significantly faster — and harder to track when consumers are simultaneously drinking coffee and pre-workout. “It’s very easy to get into a pattern where you use excessive amounts of caffeine,” he said.
An Epic Research study cited in the USA Today piece found that the rate of emergency-room visits for caffeine-related issues more than doubled for kids ages 11 to 14 between 2017 and 2023. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages caffeine for children under 12 and recommends a 100mg-a-day ceiling for teens.
The Juul comparison
Wip’s CEO Richard Mumby was previously chief marketing officer at Juul, the e-cigarette maker that paid $462 million in 2023 to settle state allegations it marketed to underage vapers. The Juul-to-caffeine-pouch executive pipeline has drawn predictable scrutiny.
Wip is pushing back on the framing. Nora Minno, the company’s director of nutrition and regulatory communications, told USA Today the slang overlap with nicotine pouches — “upper decky,” “lip pillow,” and the inevitable “caffeine zyn” — is about consumers reaching for a familiar reference point, the way Kleenex stands in for tissue. The product, Wip emphasizes, is for adults and is not positioned as a nicotine cessation aid.
Influencer marketing isn’t easing the comparison. TikTok videos linking to brands like Rebel and LyvWel pull comments like “you don’t have to be 21” and “these literally got me through high school.” Sophia Renard, an 18-year-old University of Miami student and fitness influencer who makes TikTok Shop affiliate posts for Wip, told USA Today her younger high-school-age brother has already asked her about the pouches.
The adult use case
For users on the other end of the age curve, the value proposition is genuine and the harm-reduction case is reasonable. Danielle Byrd, a 23-year-old fitness influencer, told USA Today she was previously hitting 1,000 milligrams of caffeine a day between energy drinks and pre-workout — roughly ten cups of coffee. Pouches helped her bring intake down to around 600mg, with what she described as a more even energy curve and less of a crash.
That’s the version of the category the wellness-positioned brands want featured: caffeine intake as something you can actually measure and dose, instead of guessing at how much is in a free-pour Americano. The problem, van Dam said, is that the same precision that makes pouches useful for managing intake also makes them useful for blowing past it. The format collapses ten minutes of espresso pulling into a single sticker-application motion.
Where the category goes from here
Pouches don’t face FDA pre-market review the way nicotine pouches do, and they don’t face age-gating the way energy drinks have started to in some states. That regulatory gap is the open question hanging over the category — and the gap the bigger nicotine-pouch precedent suggests will eventually close.
For now, the brands have a window. The wellness positioning is working, the retail expansion is moving, and dozens of products are in the market. What happens next depends on whether the category can grow up before the cardiac-event stories — which are not hypothetical, two are cited in the USA Today piece — start showing up faster than the brand stories.
