Who Owns NJOY?

Mark Weiss founded NJOY in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2006, making it one of the earliest American e-cigarette brands. The company won a landmark legal fight in 2010 when a federal appeals court ruled the FDA could not regulate e-cigarettes as drug-delivery devices, a decision that opened the U.S. vaping market. Its King disposable became an early category leader.

The first boom faded as Juul captured the market, and NJOY filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2016. It emerged in 2017 under new ownership and refocused on regulatory authorization, filing Premarket Tobacco Product Applications with the FDA. That bet paid off in 2022 when NJOY ACE became the first pod-based e-vapor product to receive FDA marketing authorization, followed by menthol authorizations in 2024, making NJOY one of the only legal menthol vaping products in the country.

Altria bought the company in June 2023. The plan was to leverage Altria's retail distribution, which reaches roughly 200,000 stores, to scale ACE nationally. The plan lasted less than two years. In June 2023 Juul Labs had filed ITC complaints alleging ACE infringed its patents; in January 2025 the ITC ruled for Juul and issued exclusion and cease-and-desist orders, effective March 31, 2025. NJOY ACE was pulled from the U.S. market, leaving NJOY Daily disposables as the brand's only in-market products.

Altria appealed the ruling and completed a redesigned ACE product addressing all four disputed patents, but stated it does not expect ACE to return during 2026. The company recorded non-cash impairments on the e-vapor segment in 2025 while continuing to develop next-generation NJOY products.