Looking Back on a Decade of Tobacco and Nicotine Data

By Chrissy Blasinsky

The convenience industry is familiar with this narrative—we’ve been hearing it for at least 10 years (with the exception of 2020): cigarettes sales are down, other tobacco products (OTP) sales are up.

For the past decade, the cigarette category’s share of inside sales has declined from 30.9% in 2015 to 18.8% in 2024, while OTP has increased by over three points, from 4.2% to 7.6% during that same time, according to the NACS CSX Convenience Benchmarking Database.

Higher state excise tax rates, lower smoking rates, smoking bans and other regulatory pressures continue to drive the decline of cigarette sales at convenience stores.

Meanwhile, the OTP category growth has benefited from polyuse among cigarette and OTP users and product innovation—notably within modern oral nicotine—making convenience the channel of choice for OTP customers.

There is a significant sales gap between the two categories, although that gap has been shrinking for gross profits. In fact, there’s a good chance we’ll see how narrow that gap has become when 2025 data is finalized.

Read about the six most-pressing issues the nicotine category faced last year in the NACS Magazine article “Seeing Through the Smoke.”

In 2024, cigarettes generated $6,389 in monthly gross profit versus OTP’s $5,801. By mid-2025, that gap had narrowed further—$5,664 for cigarettes and $5,328 for OTP, per NACS CSX data presented at the 2025 NACS Show. The reason? Margins. OTP’s average margin hit 29.50% in 2024, compared to just 13.76% for cigarettes in 2024.

Read more about how consumers continue to show that they are interested in backbar alternatives in the January 2026 issue of NACS Magazine feature “Nicotine Pouches Pull Ahead.”

Be the First to Get the Latest Data

The latest convenience industry cigarette and OTP category data will be presented at the 2026 NACS State of the Industry Summit, taking place April 14-16 in Schaumburg, Illinois.

Tobacco