Akron maker of nicotine, energy and nootropic pouches plans expansion,
Sean Linton and his friends were watching a Browns game about eight years ago when they started tossing around an idea for a new business.
What if they could develop a product that delivered nicotine without the tobacco? It could be used by dippers or smokers to wean themselves off the habit, much like the nicotine patch is used. But it would have the texture and taste that long-cut tobacco users crave.
"My one buddy had just got back from the dentist and the dentist was giving him a hard time," Linton said in a May 13 interview. "[We thought,] what if we came up with a different medium?"
Expansion of Fully Loaded's product line and sales
That was back in December 2016. Less than eight years later, Linton and partners Ken Dawson and Alan Duignan are running a multimillion dollar company called Fully Loaded that produces nine increasingly popular pouch and chew products.
Growth has been so fast, Linton said, that the company has moved from his house to bigger spaces in the Uniontown area and Akron and is now headed to Norton to accommodate demand.
The company currently operates at a 10,000-square-foot facility near Luigi's Restaurant, but it's at capacity and recently secured a 56,000-square-foot building in Norton for the next stage of growth. The rapid expansion of Fully Loaded has exceeded Linton's expectations, he said.
"When we moved in [the Akron location], I was like, 'This is all we're ever going to need,'" he said.
Fully Loaded has seen a lot of growth since it moved to its Akron site in 2019. Since then, its nootropic Alpha and Alpha Fuel pouches have surged ahead of the nicotine products to become the company's top sellers.
"[We] are moving tens of thousands of units a month," he said.
Fully Loaded's DRYV coffee pouch gets boost from unlikely source
The company got an unanticipated boost from free advertising when a major sports figure pulled a Fully Loaded DRYV coffee product from his golf bag.
"That is the one Tiger Woods got caught using," Linton said.
The incident went viral on social media and was mentioned on Barstool Sports, a major blog website and digital media company, he said.
Fully Loaded had to shift its production schedule to meet the sudden demand for the DRYV pouches.
"That day everything sold out," he said. "We flipped everything to coffee."
'We don't know what our ceiling is'
Another brush with fame and revenue boost came in April from a mention of Fully Loaded on the popular Joe Rogan podcast, Linton said.
Despite reaching eight figures in annual revenue, Fully Loaded is a relatively small player in the pouch products field — the nicotine pouch market alone is expected to hit $8.17 billion by 2030. Zyn, produced by a division of Philip Morris International, leads the pouch industry with more than half the U.S. market.
But the nicotine pouch products make up an increasingly smaller percentage of Fully Loaded's sales, Linton said.
The company is using six machines to make its products and has 25 employees. In June, Fully Loaded executives are traveling to Germany to test a million-dollar machine that will more than quintuple what it can produce with its current equipment.
The company hasn't reached its Fully Loaded potential, Linton said.
"We're basically selling [all] we make," he said. "We don't know what our ceiling is."
With the new space in Norton and increased production capacity, Linton said, Fully Loaded is going to find out.
"What is our ceiling if we turn the marketing on?" he said. "We're going to be able to do so much more."
Leave a message for Alan Ashworth at 330-996-3859 or email him at aashworth@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @newsalanbeaconj or Facebook at www.facebook.com/alan.newsman.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron nicotine pouch maker Fully Loaded expanding into Norton
