We recently published some data regarding Menthol sales and the likely impact on the May 2020 EU Ban on 'Characterising ' flavours. The content originally suggested that sales of Menthol products had already fallen dramatically in the past six months and also indicated that menthol smokers had moved elsewhere.

JTI challenged our findings and have worked with us to identify an issue. A key product barcode, switched during the track and trace implementation, hadn’t been identified and was therefore missing from our data set. This unfortunately has had a significant impact on the data that we were analysing. Whilst Menthol is indeed experiencing a downward trend, the reality is that declines in Menthol sales are in-line with other trends in the Tobacco category, and not the significant 57% drop that we had originally reported.

We have confirmed that our data regarding other sections of the Tobacco sector, such as Sundries, Cigarillos and Vaping are all accurate. However, the significance of the error in menthol data has left us with no option other than to retract our original release. We have since removed this piece from our website and are advising our trade press partners to do the same.

We apologise for this inconvenience and would like to thank JTI for alerting us to this error.