Tag: Taat Lifestyle & Wellness

Taat Lifestyle now Taat Global Alternatives

Photo: Taat Global Alternatives
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness will change its name to Taat Global Alternatives effective as of the commencement of trading on April 28, 2021.
There will be no change to the symbol, and the company’s common shares will continue to trade under the ticker “TAAT” on the Canadian Securities Exchange.
“Now that we have gained momentum in the $814 billion global tobacco industry, we have determined it to be important to ensure the most prominent identifying attributes of the company reflect our mission and business objectives,” said Setti Coscarella, Taat CEO, in a statement. “Last week, we announced our Beyond Nicotine initiative based on reports that the Biden administration plans to take action to reduce nicotine content in tobacco cigarettes sold in the United States.
“Our value proposition is built around offering a better alternative for smokers aged 21-plus, giving them the choice to keep the experiences they enjoy while leaving nicotine behind. With over 1.3 billion users of tobacco worldwide, we believe Taat and its Beyond Tobacco base material are relevant globally, which led to our board of directors agreeing on the updated name.”
Earlier this week, Taat applied for a Nasdaq listing.
April 27, 2021
Taat Lifestyle Applies for Nasdaq Listing

Setti Coscarella
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness has submitted an initial application for its common shares to be listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market in the United States.
Last month, the company’s common shares had been upgraded from the OTCQB Venture Market to the OTCQX Best Market.
“Ever since Taat became publicly traded on June 22, 2020, we have made great strides in our efforts to gain market share in the $814 billion global tobacco industry,” said Taat CEO Setti Coscarella in a statement.
“Between listings in American and European markets as well as our rapid ascension of the ranks in the OTC markets, I believe we have consistently strengthened our value proposition to investors around the world as a firm positioned to create long-term value in providing a better alternative to tobacco cigarettes for smokers aged 21-plus.
“We look forward to working with Nasdaq Inc. in navigating this application process, as I believe being listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market could considerably strengthen our long-term prospects as a public company.”
Marissa Dean profiled Taat in Tobacco Reporter’s January 2021 edition.
April 26, 2021
Taat Launching Online

Photo: Taat Lifestyle and Wellness
Taat will be available for purchase online by most smokers aged 21-plus in the United States through the company’s e-commerce portal, which is scheduled to launch at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Feb. 17, 2021, the company announced in a press release.
Through the company’s online shop, cartons of Taat Original, Smooth and Menthol can be purchased by smokers aged 21-plus and shipped to addresses in eligible jurisdictions. As of December 2020, Taat is available in chain and independent tobacco retailers across Ohio. By accelerating the availability of Taat in new U.S. markets, the company anticipates it could seed interest among smokers aged 21-plus as a method of prioritizing new regions in which to distribute Taat at retail. Online sales of Taat are intended to complement retail placements made and managed through Crossmark as part of the company’s scope of initiatives to gain market penetration in the United States.
The company has undertaken extensive development work on the Taat online store, which began in the fourth quarter of 2020. Key considerations in planning the online store included layout optimization for desktop, tablet and mobile web browsers as well as the implementation of mechanisms to confirm that visitors are at least 21 years of age.
Marissa Dean profiled Taat in the January edition of Tobacco Reporter.
February 16, 2021
Taat Scales up Production

Photo: Taat Lifestyle & Wellness
Taat is now being manufactured at a rate of more than 57,000 ten-pack cartons per month, which reflects a 233 percent increase from a production rate of 12 pallets per month to 40 pallets per month as of this week. This increase was prompted by sustained demand for Taat in Ohio as well as anticipated demand from smokers aged 21-plus in other U.S. states who will be able to purchase Taat online directly from the company when its e-commerce portal launches this quarter.
Recent improvements to the company’s processing facility in Las Vegas have enabled Taat to produce a greater volume of Beyond Tobacco, the product’s base material, which is refined in-house using a 14-step process including a patent-pending refinement technique. Additionally, the company has coordinated with its contract manufacturer, who also produces cigarettes for regional and global tobacco brands, to allocate additional production bandwidth to making Taat.
Setti Coscarella
“Now that we are in the ‘execution’ phase on our roadmap to gaining penetration in the $814 billion global tobacco industry, manufacturing our product has become even more crucial to our success so that we can satisfy our proven demand with a consistent supply,” said Setti Coscarella, CEO of Taat Lifestyle & Wellness, in a statement.
“As we continue to place Taat with tobacco retailers in Ohio, and as we prepare to launch the TAAT e-commerce portal this quarter, we have taken proactive steps to ensure a strong supply of TAAT is always on hand to fill orders, with more in the pipeline. More importantly, this has provided us the opportunity to begin forming standard operating procedures for scaling our manufacturing resources even further, which I believe could prove valuable in the near future.”
Marissa Dean profiled Taat Lifestyle & Wellness in Tobacco Reporter‘s January issue.
February 11, 2021
More than a Cigarette

Setti Coscarella
(Photos courtesy of Taat Lifestyle and Wellness)
Taat products offer smokers their familiar ritual without the disadvantages of nicotine and tobacco.
By Marissa Dean
In recent years, we’ve seen the tobacco and vapor industry change dramatically—focus has been shifted to less-risky products, including heat-not-burn and low-nicotine products. Now, enter hemp.
In 2018, U.S. Congress passed the Farm Bill, legalizing hemp with less than 0.3 percent THC, the psychoactive component in cannabis, in all 50 states. Since then, some tobacco farmers have either shifted to growing hemp or added it to their repertoire as an additional income source. In the November 2020 election, some states voted on cannabis legislation, deciding whether to legalize medical and/or recreational cannabis.
This poses the question of how the hemp and cannabis industry may interact with or change the tobacco and vapor industry. Some major tobacco companies have taken a stake in the hemp industry as it has grown while others are hesitant to go that route due to regulations and legality questions across states. Taat Lifestyle & Wellness seems to be bridging the gap between the two industries—its products will offer smokers a direct, comparable alternative to traditional combustible tobacco cigarettes.
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness is a publicly traded company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. According to its website, it is an early stage life sciences company. The firm says it aims to provide smokers with a better overall experience than smoking traditional cigarettes. Taat CEO Setti Coscarella notes that Taat is not your traditional cigarette. In fact, he classifies it as a completely new product.
“Nicotine is a problem,” said Coscarella, who was previously a lead strategist at Philip Morris International where he worked on the IQOS heated-tobacco product and studied smokers. “None of the tobacco companies or vape companies can wrap their mind around selling something that isn’t addictive. … [O]ur product is nonaddictive. So it has hemp, yes; it has CBD, but I’m not positioning it as a hemp cigarette with CBD because it doesn’t have the same experience as a hemp cigarette.”
Taat has created this new product using its proprietary Beyond Tobacco filler, a hemp-based filler that is processed to smell, taste and look like traditional tobacco but without the nicotine. “Nicotine as a drug is a very useless drug,” Coscarella said. “It does nothing other than keep you addicted to doing the thing that you need in order to consume that drug.”
The company’s goal with Taat cigarettes is to offer users another alternative to traditional tobacco products that will not become addictive. “I want to give smokers the freedom to choose; if they want to smoke, they can smoke; if they don’t, then they don’t have to. I think that is a very important freedom we want to give back to smokers. That’s ultimately why we exist.”

Taat cigarettes are designed to offer users an alternative to traditional tobacco products that will not become addictive.
Coscarella hopes Taat’s new products will allow smokers to make a choice—continue smoking traditional cigarettes or using vapor products, all with some level of nicotine in them, or switch to Taat, which offers the ritual of traditional cigarettes but does not contain any addictive drugs. Coscarella believes that choice is important. “I don’t think nicotine is the main reason people smoke; if it were, then for everybody who wants to quit, the [nicotine] patch would work. … If it were, then the vapes and the heat-not-burn products would have a higher long-term efficacy rate with actual smokers because I’m just giving you nicotine. But they don’t. [Smokers] go back [to smoking traditional combustible cigarettes] because there’s a certain ritualistic component on the other side that none of these other things have. I think it’s important to try to match that ritual where I think the low-nicotine products obviously would have something from that standpoint, but you still have a physiological piece that needs to counterbalance somehow.”
Low-nicotine products are attempting to “fix” the smoking problem—the idea behind these products is that smokers can switch to low-nicotine cigarettes and then eventually stop smoking. However, Coscarella does not think they will work very well. “You haven’t replaced it [nicotine] with anything. You’re just giving your consumers less of something.” Taat, however, aims to avoid that issue by replacing the nicotine with CBD in the products. Many people erroneously think that cigarettes calm them down, according to Coscarella, when in reality they feel calm after smoking only because they were experiencing nicotine withdrawal. Smoking provides the nicotine your body was craving. Taat products can give consumers that calming feeling to counteract the feeling generated from nicotine withdrawal, thanks to the CBD in the Beyond Tobacco filler.

Taat products will soon be on the market; on Dec. 11, products will be shipping to Ohio distributors for sale. Each pack will retail for $3.99—allowing users of any cigarette brand to afford Taat—and will be available for purchase by those aged 21 or older. Taat will have online age verification for purchases through its website and much like tobacco, will work with retailers to ensure their customers are of legal age as well. “We’ll have a self-declaration online, so someone should be over the age of 21. And then from a retailer standpoint, they should endeavor to police this as they do any combustible cigarette product that they would otherwise sell,” said Coscarella.
Currently, hemp is not regulated in the same ways that tobacco and vapor products are. Outside of the Farm Bill, regulations vary from state to state, and hemp products are not under the oversight of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or subject to anti-smoking bills or certain federal, state or municipal excise taxes. “That being said,” said Coscarella, “it’s imperative that we’re able to communicate what the value of this product is from a societal standpoint,” in much the same way that the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) process aims to do with tobacco products.
Coscarella believes the FDA will eventually get involved with hemp. “If cannabis were to be legalized—depending on how the election pans out—it’s likely that it will require regulation, and if that happens, I don’t think they’ll carve out hemp. No different than how it was done in Canada. When they passed the Cannabis Act—the Cannabis Act encompasses both cannabis and hemp.” So while Taat isn’t currently faced with major restrictions, that could change.
Much like the rest of the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the launch and marketing of Taat. While in-person events would help with building the buzz, Coscarella said, the company’s marketing plan will be heavily online-based. “I think you get a better return on investment from a digital ad that can be served to somebody when they’re in the time to see it.”
Taat cigarettes will be an interesting addition to the ever-changing smoking industry. As the company prepares to roll out this initial product, Coscarella is already looking ahead. “I think there are other areas within the tobacco space that would be interesting for us to look at, whether it be through different delivery mechanisms or different formats. … But initially, I think the exercise is to go after the biggest category and build a family of brands that can help capture some of those ancillary areas.”
Marissa Dean joined Tobacco Reporter in the summer of 2018 as a copy editor.Since that time, she has taken on additional responsibilities, including feature writing.Her skills span the publishing industry from layout and design to copy editing to content creation.

January 1, 2021
Taat’s Hemp Cigarette Arrives in Ohio

Photo: Taat Lifestyle & Wellness
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness has started distributing Taat, its tobacco and nicotine-free hemp cigarette, in the United States, the company announced in a statement. On Dec. 11, 2020, a first shipment of Taat arrived at the Canton, Ohio, warehouse of ADCO Distributors.
Taat Chief Revenue Officer Tim Corkum said he was impressed with the rapid rollout of Taat.
“It was exactly four months ago that I joined the company to lead commercialization efforts for Taat in the United States, and I consider it an incredible accomplishment for us to have taken the product from its first iteration to being retail-ready and in a distributor’s warehouse in that short of a period without any of the advantages that an established tobacco industry firm would have,” he said.
“We are thrilled to be receiving the first distribution-scale batch of TAAT right on schedule, so that we can begin filling pre-orders from our tobacco retailer accounts across the state of Ohio,” said Pat Bell, chief operating officer of ADCO commented.
“Additionally, we have received numerous requests from retailers who wish to place an order for TAAT upon the arrival of the first shipment to our warehouse, which we anticipate could lead to even more orders of TAAT. For a product that is not yet sold at retail, I am very impressed with the amount of interest that TAAT has managed to garner over the past few months.”
In October 2020, the Taat Lifestyle & Wellness announced that it would be debuting Taat in Ohio. Initial launch activities included the rollout of a large-scale digital marketing campaign targeting legal-aged smokers in Ohio and sales efforts coordinated by a key accounts manager with more than a decade of sales experience with one of the world’s largest tobacco companies.
December 14, 2020
Taat Starts Commercial-Scale Production

Photo: Taat Lifestyle and Wellness
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness’ contract manufacturing partner has begun commercial-scale production after receiving a supply of Beyond Tobacco base material from the company.
This batch will be packaged using an updated Taat pack design, similar to the provisional pack designs published in September. Beginning in November 2020, when initial production of Taat is expected to be completed, inventory of Taat is to be shipped from the manufacturer’s warehouse to tobacco wholesalers in Ohio, who will then be able to fulfill orders for Taat from tobacco retailer accounts in the convenience channel.
Beyond Tobacco is the nicotine-free and tobacco-free base material of Taat, an alternative to traditional cigarettes, the company explained in a press note. Taat has been engineered to closely replicate every aspect of the cigarette-smoking experience, including a combustible stick format, cigarette-style packaging, an enhanced volume of smoke exhaled, and a taste and smell similar to tobacco attained by way of a patent-pending refinement technique.
October 28, 2020
Kit Dietz Joins Taat Board of Advisers

Kit Dietz (Photo: Taat Lifestyle & Wellness)
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness has appointed Kit Dietz to its board of advisors.
Dietz has more than three decades of experience in the convenience wholesale industry, including top management roles with well-known convenience channel distributors in the northern United States. Dietz also served on the board of directors of Lorillard, leading up to its $27.4 billion acquisition in June 2015.
More recently, Dietz became President of InfoRhythm, a business data analytics firm for retail and wholesale businesses and their respective supply chains providing prescriptive data-driven insights to CPG companies, convenience distributors, and retailers.
Based out of northern Ohio, Dietz presently advises CPG companies and top management of distribution firms using his extensive knowledge of the convenience channel at a granular level.
“We are excited for Kit Dietz to join Taat as an advisor, just in time for our mid-Q4 2020 launch in Ohio,” said Taat CEO Setti Coscarella in a statement.
“With an advisor such as Mr. Dietz who understands how convenience products such as tobacco are distributed in and near our launch market, I am confident that we will be able to benefit from his market-specific experience to establish the right margins, the right partnerships, and the right analytics models to make calculated and informed business decisions as we contemplate possible expansions into new markets.”
October 16, 2020
Taat Releases Pack Designs

Photo: Taat Lifestyle & Wellness
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness has released provisional new pack designs for its Beyond Tobacco cigarettes.
Key elements include greater dominance of colors commonly associated with certain varieties of combustible products (e.g., green for menthol), centered placement of text and graphic elements for a more “balanced” appearance, and prominence of elements that define Taat’s brand to include “Beyond Tobacco.”
“Packaging and trade dress are arguably the backbone of any consumer packaged good [CPG] when it comes to building preference and brand loyalty,” said Taat CEO Setti Coscarella, in a press note.
“While I am entirely confident that Beyond Tobacco will make its mark among current legal-aged smokers of tobacco cigarettes on its merits as an actual product, cultivating long-term loyalty and preference through a visibly recognizable trade dress to include packaging is a fundamental component of the success of any CPG product.”
Consumer feedback regarding this provisional design will be factored into the final iteration of the product. Taat plans to launch Beyond Tobacco cigarettes in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2020.

October 2, 2020
Taat Seeks Patent Protection

Photo: Taat Lifestyle & Wellness
Taat Lifestyle & Wellness has filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the proprietary refinement process of the base material for Beyond Tobacco cigarettes. This process contributes to the tobacco flavor and aroma of Beyond Tobacco cigarettes, which is the product’s hallmark feature as a tobacco-free and nicotine-free alternative to tobacco cigarettes.
“Patents are of incredible importance in this industry because when you consider that the global market for tobacco is worth more than $800 billion, you’re not just protecting years or decades of research and hard work, you’re also protecting the ability to recover your investment and earn a profit,” said Taat CEO Setti Coscarella.
“The company has been on the path to commercialization for just a matter of months, which followed a lengthy period of research and development for Beyond Tobacco cigarettes. As confident as I may be that the truly ‘magic’ parts of this product would be nearly impossible for anyone to duplicate, anybody who has worked in this industry knows that patents can be extremely cost-effective, given how expensive not having a patent can be in some cases.”
To help smokers quit tobacco, Taat has sought to closely replicate the experience of smoking a tobacco cigarette.
September 8, 2020