Citation

Ma, S., Kaareen, A., Park, H., He, Y., Jiang, S., Qiu. Z., Xie, Z., Li, D., Chen, J., O'Connor, R.J., Fong, GT., Shang, C. (2024). How to identify e-cigarette brands available in the United States during 2020-2022: Development and usability study. Journal of Medical Internal Research (JIMR) Formative Research. [Published online Feb 28, doi: 10.2196/47570].

Abstract

Background: Prior studies have demonstrated that the e-cigarette market contains a large number of brands. Identifying these existing e-cigarette brands is a key element of market surveillance, which will further assist in policy making and compliance checks.

Objective: To facilitate the surveillance of the diverse product landscape in the e-cigarette market, we constructed a semantic database of e-cigarette brands that have appeared in the US market as of 2020- 2022.

Methods: In order to build the brand database, we searched and compiled e-cigarette brands from a comprehensive list of retail channels and sources, including (1) e-liquid and disposable brands sold in web-based stores, (2) e-cigarette brands sold in brick-and-mortar stores and collected by the Nielsen Retail Scanner Data, (3) e-cigarette brands compiled by Wikipedia, (4) self-reported e-cigarette brands from the 2020 International Tobacco Control Four-Country Smoking and Vaping (ITC 4CV) US survey, and (5) e-cigarette brands on Twitter. We also estimated the top 5 e-cigarette brands by sales volume in brick-and-mortar stores, by the frequency and variety of offerings in web-based shops, and by the frequency of self-reported brands from the 2020 ITC 4CV US survey.

Results: As of 2020-2022, a total of 912 e-cigarette brands have been sold by various retail channels. During 2020-2022, the top 5 brands are JUUL, vuse, njoy, blu, and logic in brick-and-mortar stores; blu, king, monster, twist, and air factory for e-liquids in web-based stores; hyde, pod mesh, suorin, vaporlax, and xtra for disposables sold in web-based stores; and smok, aspire, vaporesso, innokin, and eleaf based on self-reported survey data.

Conclusions: As the US Food and Drug Administration enforces the premarket tobacco market authorization, many e-cigarette brands may become illegal in the US market. In this context, how ecigarette brands evolve and consolidate in different retail channels will be critical for understanding the regulatory impacts on product availability. Our semantic database of e-cigarette brands can serve as a useful tool to monitor product and marketplace development, conduct compliance checks, assess manufacturers' marketing behaviors, and identify regulatory impacts.