On July 29, without any fanfare at all, Juul quietly released a new vape pen that may well determine the future of the world’s most valuable e-cigarette firm.
The Juul C1 is the company’s first Bluetooth-connected e-cigarette. Through the accompanying app, Juul users can track how much they’re vaping, lock the e-cigarette so no one else can use it, and keep tabs on the device if it goes missing. Juul users will have to submit a selfie and a photo of government-issued ID in order to use the app, and can set it so the e-cigarette is only useable when the device has been unlocked by the smartphone’s owner. It also has an auto-lock function which will stop the e-cigarette working when it is out of range of the paired smartphone.
But this device – which was piloted in Canada earlier this year – isn’t just the latest version of the San Fransiscan firm’s flagship product. For Juul, the C1 is its opportunity to prove that it can keep its devices out of the hands of underage people, and curb rising youth vaping in the US. And as the $38 billion (£31.2bn) firm faces the prospect of its e-cigarettes being outlawed altogether in the US, this innocuous UK trial could be its last chance to convince American authorities that its e-cigarettes are safe enough to be sold in the US.
“This is by no means the final product,” says Juul’s director of product management, Roxy Wacyk. “We are looking to now continually iterate on this feature set as we collect feedback and understand what’s most valuable to Juul users.”
Future versions of the app, which is currently only available on Android, might block the e-cigarettes from being used in certain locations, or allow users to set their own usage limits in the app. “The aspiration of the team is – with this and with additional features that we then roll out – to enable any Juul user to set and meet any goal they have around usage, and that includes zero Juul usage,” Wacyk says.
She also hinted that – if it is deemed a success – the C1 may replace Juul’s current e-cigarette as the firm’s core product. Simplicity has always been a key part of the brand’s success, notes Juul’s UK managing director, Dan Thompson. In form and function the C1 is nearly identical to Juul’s standard vape – the only substantial difference is that it lets users have more control over their device, if they want it.
It’s not only Juul users that might appreciate these added features. In the US, e-cigarette firms have until May 2020 to submit their products to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval to be sold in the country. If Juul’s e-cigarettes aren’t approved by the FDA – or the firm fails to submit an application – they will be removed from sale.
Until now, the FDA has not required approval for any liquid-based e-cigarettes, but a slew of anti-tobacco groups took the FDA to court in order to bring the original 2022 approval deadline forward. Now Juul and the other e-cigarette manufacturers will have to convince the FDA that their tobacco products would protect public health and are not likely to encourage young people to take up e-cigarettes.
“It's really going to come down to whether FDA thinks that letting the product on the market is probably going to turn out okay,” says Eric Lindblom, a former FDA tobacco control official now at Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute. “I think for sure [Juul] is doing this in Canada and the UK in order to get really strong research to say 'this stops or drastically reduces youth use of our product' as that's the only thing FDA has expressed a concern about.”
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In the US, youth vaping rates are rising dramatically. In 2017 11.7 per cent of high school students had used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days. In 2018, that jumped to 20.8 per cent – with over a quarter of young e-cigarette users saying they vaped on 20 or more of the past 30 days.
Much of the blame for this rise in youth vaping has landed at Juul’s door. The firm – which has cornered 70 per cent of the US e-cigarette market – has been roundly criticised for early marketing campaigns that included Facebook and Instagram posts featuring youthful people or that plugged the brand’s flavoured pods which had names such as Creme Brulee and Cool Cucumber. In November 2018, Juul closed its Facebook and Instagram accounts and agreed to stop selling flavoured pods in retail stores in the US – pre-empting likely FDA restrictions on flavoured pods.
The C1 could be a further attempt from Juul to get out ahead of regulation and convince the FDA that its own features are adequate to curb youth vaping, Lindblom says. “If Juul is smart, before [the May 2020] deadline it’ll put in an application for products with these [Bluetooth] elements and also put in applications for all the products it currently has on the market, because if it doesn’t put in an application it can be taken off the market immediately,” he says.
But this approach could backfire. “If [Juul] puts these features on their UK and Canada products and Juul still becomes the most popular e-cigarette brand among youth, then it’s really screwed,” Lindblom says. Unlike the US, vaping among young people in the UK remains low. A 2019 report from Public Health England found that only 1.7 per cent of under-18s use e-cigarettes weekly or more, and among young people who have never smoked, only 0.2 per cent of them use e-cigarettes regularly. In the UK, Juul is the most popular pod-based e-cigarette but it still has a smaller market share than the most popular refillable vapes.
When it comes to approving Juul’s application – assuming it puts one in – Lindblom says that the FDA may want to understand how far the regulatory framework in other countries has influenced youth vaping rates. In the EU, the nicotine content of vape pods are capped at 1.7 per cent, while in the US Juul pods are available in both five per cent and three per cent options.
Once Juul and the other e-cigarette firms have applied for market approval – a process known as premarket tobacco application – the FDA will decide whether to approve the product, ask for specific requirements to be met, or reject the application altogether. The agency may also ask for the companies to abide by extra regulations restricting the marketing and sale of e-cigarettes.
Ultimately, however, the rules around product approval allow the FDA a large degree of leeway when it comes to assessing the safety of products, and while the FDA is reviewing the approval applications they will remain on sale in the US. By the time the May 2020 comes around, it will finally have to confront an issue it has been putting off for nearly a decade and deal with a youth vaping epidemic that is – at least partly – a challenge of its own making.
“FDA didn’t regulate responsibly,” says Lindblom. “[It] could have done a tonne more to stop this problem from happening, nipping it in the bud and stopping it from happening in the first place. But it didn't.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
