Center for Rapid Surveillance of Tobacco (CRST) will perform surveillance of tobacco product marketing, the tobacco product marketplace, and tobacco use behaviors, transforming tobacco surveillance to be rapid, comprehensive, and coordinated, with salient findings fed immediately into traditional data collection systems. By identifying and evaluating signals in a timely fashion, the CRST will generate critical actionable information about changes in tobacco products which can inform FDA’s regulation of tobacco products leading to a substantial public health impact.
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Tobacco Industry Monitoring (TIM) Alert
Tobacco Industry Marketing (TIM) Alerts provide weekly newsletters to subscribers to keep up to date with tobacco industry marketing and emerging tobacco products.
Excerpt from the Aug 7, 2026 TIM Alert
CIGARS
Dutch announced in a business-to-business magazine advertisement (NACS magazine) that the company will change the packaging for their cigarillo products. The new packaging will launch in January 2027.
ENDS
Geek Bar posted a video on Instagram that includes customer testimonials from Rolling Loud 2026, a music festival that took place in Florida in May. The festival attendees share their opinions about the Geek Bar Mate 60k, a pod-based device with a magnetic battery attachment. They cite the flavors, sweetness, and cost-effectiveness of only buying the battery once as attractive product features. Geek Bar does not currently have any product authorizations from FDA. Geek Bar’s website claims that they “have submitted PMTAs to the FDA for our products, including no flavored products aside from tobacco and menthol pods.”