Ahead of World No Tobacco Day on 31 May, Brussels Morning sat down with BAT’s Eric Sensi-Minautier to talk about where the tobacco industry is headed in 2025. And it is not quite what one would think.
He is not a man to get lost in the niceties of diplomatic small talk. Eric Sensi-Minautier, director for EU Public Affairs, British American Tobacco, doesn’t try to hide a certain degree of impatience with the lack of understanding of how the tobacco industry has changed. To sum it up. The industry is transforming itself, but the world refuses to acknowledge it:
“There is a consumer-led revolution going on – away from cigarettes and to smokeless products. For this reason, we are making major investments across Europe in our portfolio of new category products, all of it with the aim of reducing the health impact of our business”.
Concretely, between 2023 and 2028, BAT will invest 500 million euro in its recently opened innovation hub in Trieste, Italy. Rising demand for new category products including vaping, pouches and heated tobacco products is already kicking in and new nicotine products helped support 137,000 jobs and €17 billion in GDP across the EU-27 in 2021. Already the industry has a major positive impact on the EU economy by driving job creation, innovation and growth. The most recent data – from 2021 – shows the industry contributing to EU budgets in the form of taxes and VAT payments to the tune of 107,5 billion euros in 2021 – near the double of French defence spending that year.
“The news is that there is a real innovation happening in our industry. It has already delivered a choice of harm-reduced nicotine products. We intend to develop more such innovative products in Trieste. There is a real transformation going on. The industry is now a part of the solution and no longer just the problem,”
Sensi-Minautier insists, while adding that innovation is what will help the EU meet its policy goal of a tobacco-free generation by 2040, not market restrictions and administrative forms.
The claim is backed by the European Commission’s own Eurobarometer data which shows that the primary reason to start vaping for the majority of vapers is to quit or to reduce their cigarette consumption. The European Parliament has endorsed tobacco harm reduction on two occasions, and a public consultation for evaluating the EU’s framework for tobacco control, revealed that 77% of respondents strongly agree or agree that novel nicotine products can help to quit smoking. Yet, this is a not always an easy message to get across:
“The public debate mistakenly tends to get stuck on the flavours of vaping products as a gateway for new smokers. The reality is that the overwhelming number of cases show that smokeless products are a gateway out of smoking. We honestly feel that policy makers are barking up the wrong tree here,” says Sensi-Minautier and explains that flavours are really about attracting adult smokers to less harmful smokeless products.
“Like all products which have a taste, flavour is important. It has also been showed that flavours are important for reducing the risk of a former smokers relapsing as they don’t trigger the same taste as a cigarettes, thus playing a key role to help smokers make the switch,”
Argues Sensi-Minautier.
He underlines that the predictable side effect of banning flavours and limiting access to harm reduced products is to drive products and trade to illegal markets where all quality control and safety disappear out the window. In the process, it leads to important losses in tax revenues and drives consumers towards illegal products supplier by criminal networks.
“If we look at the results in markets with different approaches to the availability of harm reduced products, the differences are striking. When we compare the situation in Australia, where until very recently the sale of such products was prescription based, with that of neighbouring New Zealand, the latter’s much more progressive approach has secured significantly better results with decreasing number of smokers. We see the same results in Sweden, the Czech Republic and the UK”.
- All this said, there is still the difficult issue of vaping flavours that appeal to minors who may never become cigarette smokers, but vapers. How will the industry tackle that?
“Our unflinching view is that nicotine products are for adults only, underage access is not tolerable. It is a complicated issue which will require a wide range of stakeholders to come together. At BAT we are working through retail controls, responsible marketing, and collaborating with business partners. We think technology and innovation can play a big role to prevent underage access and usage,”
Says Sensi-Minautier.
Therefore BAT is working to create a connected technology-driven ecosystem across smokeless products that will rely on age-verified accounts of the consumer. This technology will ensure that vaping devices can only be accessed by adult consumers. BAT is already rolling out pilots with retailers in Croatia and Belgium.
But the industry is saddled with a bad press which can make it an uphill battle to share such innovative solutions with both the wider public and with policy makers.
Sensi-Minautier argues that there is a lack of objective information about both science and innovation when it comes to the tobacco industry. Therefore, BAT has recently launched the so-called Omni, dubbed asmokelessworld.com.
It is a free, web-based resource which gathers knowledge and data from BAT and non-industry third parties. BAT hopes this will contribute to more informed debates in general and specifically to the expected revision of the EU Tobacco products directive when it gets underway in the near future.
“We hope the Omni can pave the way for a more balanced debate favouring a science-based decision-making process. What is needed now is common sense and robust enforcement of existing requirements, not further regulations,”
Says Eric Sensi-Minautier.
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Frenchman Eric Sensi-Minautier is a seasoned public affairs professional and has been with British American Tobacco for almost a decade and as director for EU Public Affairs since 2020. Studies at Sciences-Po Aix-en-Provence and University College London.
