When a guide states a fill weight, a pH window or how a pouch is sealed, that number comes off our own line. And the batch number on the can’s ingredient label ties what you are holding back to the bag the salt came from.
Four dates, and why they are not the same date
Three years separate the first date from the last, and the gaps are the point. Registering a company is not the same as building a line. Building a line is not the same as running it. Running it is not the same as selling cans to UK customers and answering for them afterwards.
He has done all four, in that order, and the guides are written from the last position looking back at the first.
Twenty-eight years a customer
He grew up in Upplands Väsby, north of Stockholm, and started on snus in 1998, at eighteen. Snus, not nicotine pouches — the tobacco-free kind did not exist as a consumer product then, and would not for years afterwards.
He moved across to nicotine pouches in 2016, on Epok Blueberry. Epok was one of the first tobacco-free pouch brands there was. So the count is twenty-eight years in oral nicotine and ten of them on pouches, starting at the point the category itself started. He did not arrive at this industry when it got big. He was in it before it was one.
It matters for one reason. Almost everything written about nicotine pouches is written by people who have never had one under their lip.
You cannot judge a nicotine pouch from a data sheet. How the nicotine and the flavour actually release. The flavour intensity that drifts between two cans of the same thing. The after-flavour from chemical sweeteners that sits in the mouth long after the pouch has come out. The seal that has gone soft on a shelf.
Those are the things this factory was built to control, and he can name them because he has had every one of them.
Why LUMI exists
He sold nicotine pouches before he made them. After a successful racing career — fifteen years of professional motorcycle speedway between 2001 and 2016, and four Long Track world titles — he founded nicotine-pouches.com, shipped to customers all over the world, and answered the support inbox himself.
That domain points here now. The shop did not get replaced by LUMI so much as it turned into it.
That inbox is where the product knowledge actually came from. Not a focus group and not a market report — thousands of individual messages from people saying which flavours they came back for, which strength they had settled on and how long it took them to find it, what they had switched away from, and what made them stop reordering.
Very few people in this industry have read that volume of first-hand preference data. Almost nobody who has read it then went and built a factory.
Because that is the unusual part: the order. Most manufacturers build a line and then go looking for people who want what it makes. He had the demand side answered before factory planning started, and built the line to serve what he already knew.
He also knew what the supply chain was doing to the price, because he had been paying it. Every distributor, wholesaler and retailer between a factory and a customer takes a margin, and the customer pays all of them.
So the goal was fixed before the first machine was bought: make nicotine pouches people actually love, and sell them at a price the rest of the market structurally cannot reach. Both halves only work together.
Both halves need the same answer. You cannot hold the quality without owning the line, because a contract manufacturer sells you their spec rather than yours, and you find out about a bad batch from your own customers. You cannot hold the price without going direct to the end consumer, for the reason above.
So we run our own line in Poznań and we ship direct from Sheffield. That is the whole business model. There is no third thing.
It shows up in one number. A LUMI can started at £2.49 in 2024. It is £1.59 today, flat across every flavour and every strength.
Nothing about the pouch got cheaper. The volume went up, so the same materials cost less to buy and the operating cost per can fell, and that reduction went to customers rather than into margin. The next move is down again.
Which raises the obvious question, so here is the answer to it. The recipe has never been changed to hit a price. Cost plays no part in deciding what goes into a LUMI pouch — every ingredient is in there for a reason, and in no case is the reason that it was the cheaper option.
What falls with volume is what those same materials cost to buy, not what they are. Nothing has been substituted, thinned or swapped for a cheaper equivalent. The rest of it comes from owning the line and selling direct, which are the two places money actually goes missing in this industry.
The shop taught him what people buy. The support inbox taught him what makes them stop. The line taught him what a machine will actually hold. None of that is unusual on its own. Having all of it in one head is.
What he had to learn first
He started knowing nothing about the chemistry. So he spent several years reading everything he could find on nicotine, and on nicotine pouches in particular.
That included the patent literature — product patents and machine patents both. Live patents are off limits and stay off limits. Expired ones are where this industry has already written down, in detail, what actually works, because detail is the price of protection.
He read every filing on Google Patents that looked like it could teach him something he did not already know. Almost nobody selling nicotine pouches has opened one.
It taught him two separate things: how a pouch mixture is really built, and how industrial machines are put together. Both turned out to be necessary.
Why we design and build our own machines
The original plan was the ordinary one. Buy pouching machines from Asia, have them installed, press start, produce.
They were installed, and it was immediately obvious they would never produce to the standard he had set. So he worked out what was actually needed, and then designed and built the machines himself.
LUMI’s pouching machines are our own IP, and he made every single part of them himself. The software is the one exception, and only a partial one: he specified exactly what it had to do, and a developer wrote the code to that spec.
It took eighteen months from the machines arriving to a pouch he would put his name on.
Building the machine is not the interesting part on its own. A machine maker knows nothing about how a pouch should be — how it should sit, how it should feel at minute forty, what the release should do across a session. And a product developer cannot change a machine that will not hold a fill weight.
Normally those are two different departments that never meet, and the product is what gets compromised, because you end up formulating to whatever the machine already does. Here it went the other way round. The spec came first and the machine was built to serve it.
The reason he could do it at all is those fifteen years on a race bike. None of that says anything about nicotine pouches and none of it is meant to. What it meant in practice was a working life spent on mechanical tolerances, at a level of precision industrial machinery does not usually bother with.
The patents showed him how industrial machines are built. Racing had already shown him how to make something exact. Our machines use racing technology for that reason.
Each machine runs at 310 pouches a minute. That is level with the best European machines in the same category, and ahead of some. There are four of them on the floor, so the line runs at 1,240 pouches a minute — and every one of those machines was designed and built by the person who writes these guides.
How a flavour survives
The first attempt was to buy the expertise in. We paid flavour experts. They turned out to be very good salespeople.
So it came in house, and it is run like a kitchen rather than a purchase order. Flavours are built by mixing flavours — every ingredient balanced against every other one, in fine detail, then tested again over a full session rather than a first-minute impression.
More than 150 different flavours have been developed and tested, most of them through several iterations each. Five made it to sale. Every one of those five then went through many more rounds of ingredient, concentration and mix before it was signed off — Freeze Mint took six months of its own and more than a hundred iterations to get right.
That is the ratio worth sitting with. A hundred and fifty attempts, five products. The other hundred and forty-five were not failures in any sense that matters; they were how we found out what the five needed to be.
The longest job was not any single flavour. It was working out how different flavour ingredients behave against the oral mucosa.
Some are harsh in a pouch even when they are perfectly pleasant everywhere else, and nothing on a flavour house’s data sheet tells you which. So we tested and recorded, ingredient by ingredient, until we had our own database of what works in a pouch and what does not.
That database is now the most useful thing in the flavour room. A candidate containing an ingredient we already know fails never gets built at all. Every experiment we have run makes the next one shorter. That is the compounding kind of R&D, and it is precisely the thing that cannot be bought in — which is what the flavour experts were selling.
The programme has not stopped. Four new flavours are in R&D now and have been for the past twelve months. As it stands they release at the end of 2026. If any of them stops being right before then, it joins the other hundred and forty-five.
Flavour is only half of it. Settling on the pH was a six-month R&D project by itself. pH governs how the nicotine comes out of the pouch, and the window where the release stays balanced across a full session — rather than arriving all at once in the first few minutes and then falling away — is narrow. Six months to fix one number.
Making something simple is easy. That was never the point.
What the batch number on the can gets you
Every raw material entering the factory arrives with a certificate of analysis, and is then tested again on arrival — visual checks on everything, and pH measured on the ingredients where pH matters. Those results are recorded, so a change in a supplier’s material shows up as a movement in our own numbers rather than as a complaint six months later.
Mixing is controlled by material handling software. Every product and every batch carries a barcode. Each ingredient is scanned and weighed, and the software will not release the next step until the weight is right. An ingredient cannot be forgotten, because forgetting one stops the batch.
Every ingredient is picked by batch and recorded against the batch number, and that number is printed on the ingredient label on the can.
It is the link between the can in your hand and every raw material batch that went into it — which bag the salt came from, which bottle the nicotine came from. Full backward traceability, on every can that leaves the building.
Kylmäkorpi Sp. z o.o. is certified to ISO 9001:2015 by LL-C (Certification) Czech Republic a.s., certificate 4802522. It is listed as active on the IAF CertSearch register, so you can check it against an independent record instead of taking our word for it.
The factory also operates to HACCP and GMP guidelines. Operates to, not certified against — that is a real difference and we are not going to blur it.
What he actually does, week to week
There is no part of this company he has not personally worked on. That is not a line about working hard. It is how a small company gets marginal gains at all: the person who sets the pH window is the same person who reads the number that comes back.
Who else runs LUMI
LUMI is a family business. Sandra Kylmäkorpi is co-founder and runs the other half of it: administration, the bonded warehouse, stock, the website and customer support. If Joonas owns what goes into the can, Sandra owns everything that happens to it afterwards.
Product questions are the only ones passed to Joonas. Fewer than one reaches him a month. On a shop selling cans every day, that is the number we watch hardest. It is a more honest test of whether the batches are right than any score out of five.
How a LUMI guide gets written
How to tell whether a nicotine pouch guide is worth reading
Most guides in this category are written by people who have never seen a pouch made and, in many cases, have never used one.
That is not an accusation, it is a business model: a retailer buys stock, hires a writer, and the writer works from other people’s articles. It is why so many pouch guides say the same soft things in a slightly different order.
You do not have to take anyone’s word for which is which. Five questions sort it, on any site including this one.
On this site: yes, and you can check him on Wikipedia. Yes, and the numbers come off our own line. Yes, and he built the machine that does the measuring. Yes, and gaps are printed as gaps. Yes — he sells the pouches, stated again below in plainer words.
Run the same five questions on the next pouch guide you read.
What we will not print
Corrections
Wrong is wrong. If you find an error in a LUMI guide, tell us and it gets fixed, with a dated correction note at the foot of that guide saying what changed. We do not quietly edit and pretend it always said that.
Where the money comes from
He sells the product he writes about. That is the plain conflict of interest and you should read every guide holding it. It is also the reason the guides can be specific where other pages hedge — the person writing them can walk fifty metres and open the batch folder.
What customers say
4.9 out of 5, from 648 reviews on the LUMI UK shop, recorded 21 August 2026.
We publish the count and the date it was taken rather than a rounded claim. A review number with no date attached is not a fact.