A federal court sided with health groups in 2019, forcing the FDA to begin enforcing the authorization process for e-cigarette companies. The FDA gave e-cigarette makers a 2020 deadline to apply for authorization or be forced off the shelves. (That deadline was later pushed back, due to Covid.) Juul had been on sale for four years, making up 75 percent of the e-cigarette market at the time. But the future was beginning to look cloudy.
Jules had now to turn. The company, as Jamie Ducharme writes in her 2019 book big vape† modeled itself after a typical San Francisco startup where people would “skate back and forth across the concrete floors of the office, firing at each other with foam Nerf darts.” Many early employees, such as founders Monsees and Bowen, had design and marketing backgrounds. Juul now had to adapt to regulatory scrutiny and produce extensive reports on the product’s components, ingredients and health risks in order to gain FDA approval.
The company began hiring people to handle government relations and manage public affairs. It also crippled its own product range, taking the most popular flavors – such as mango and fruit mix – off the shelves to leave only menthol, mint and tobacco pods. The company’s announcement of the news quoted then-CEO KC Crosthwaite as promising “to reset the vape category by gaining the trust of society and working with regulators, policymakers and stakeholders.”
Many US lawmakers were unimpressed. A spate of mysterious lung injuries linked to other vaping companies has further tarnished the reputation of the new industry. In 2019, San Francisco banned all vape products that had not been reviewed by the FDA, preventing Juul from selling its products in its hometown. By the end of the year, Congress had passed legislation to raise the national age for e-cigarette sales from 18 to 21.
None of that has threatened Juul as much as the FDA, which has started to make big swings in the vaping market. In 2020, it ordered a halt to sales of all vaping products with sweet and fruity flavors, as Juul seemed to anticipate, and in 2021 it refused marketing approval for more than 55,000 flavored e-cigarette products.
Finally, in June of this year, the FDA came before Juul, refused its own marketing application and ordered its products off the market. While the official reasoning said the company hadn’t provided enough toxicology data, FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf noted in a statement that Juul may have “played a disproportionate role in the rise in youth vaping.”
Even if Jul survives, its moment as disruptive industry leader may be over. Jeong, the Cornell graduate, says his colleagues stopped using Juuls when the company discontinued the popular flavors. They loved mint, which was left on the shelves, but no one wanted to puff on a tobacco-flavored Juul.
Instead of dropping their vaping habit, his friends switched to other brands emerging to pick up Juul’s declining market share. One of them, Fume, still sells flavors like pineapple, which Jeong describes as “drinking a piña colada,” thanks to a new regulatory loophole. The FDA’s ban applies to flavored vape cartridges, such as Juul’s pods, but not to disposable e-cigarettes, which are pre-charged and pre-filled. By 2020, the disposable Puff Bar, with flavors like Banana Ice and Blue Razz, had replaced Juul as the most popular vaping device among teens.
