How to Benchmark Your OTP Category Performance (5-35 Store Convenience Chains)

Other Tobacco Products (OTP) — cigars, smokeless tobacco, modern oral nicotine pouches, vapor, and heated tobacco — have become one of the fastest-moving categories in convenience retail. But if you run an independent store or a small chain of roughly 5 to 35 locations, there is currently no free, publicly available source that breaks out OTP margin or performance benchmarks specifically by chain size. This page will not invent one. Instead, it gives you the real, sourced industry-wide trend data that does exist, and a practical framework for benchmarking your own stores against it.

The honest starting point: no free, chain-size-segmented OTP benchmark exists

The most authoritative benchmark of convenience-retail category performance — NACS’s State of the Industry Report® of 2025 Data — segments some metrics by store count, but it is a paywalled report ($499 for NACS members, $1,199 for non-members, available at convenience.org/soireport), and its category-level dollar tables are not excerpted anywhere for free. No trade association, distributor, or publication currently publishes a free OTP margin or performance benchmark broken out specifically for small chains. If a specific chain-size-segmented OTP dollar figure shows up presented as free and public elsewhere, it is not independently verifiable against any source we have found — treat it with the same skepticism we are applying here.

What the freely available trend data actually shows

While no one publishes small-chain-segmented benchmarks for free, several real, independently sourced trend data points are publicly available and worth knowing:

  • OTP has overtaken cigarettes in share of in-store gross profit for the first time in NACS’s data set. NACS Magazine’s August 2026 feature “Rebalancing the Backbar” reports OTP at 6.7% of in-store gross profit versus cigarettes at 6.6% — both sourced to the NACS State of the Industry Report® of 2025 Data, combined with NIQ data. Source: NACS Magazine, “Rebalancing the Backbar,” August 2026, citing NACS State of the Industry Report® of 2025 Data + NIQ.
  • The multi-year shift is large and sustained. NACS’s own CSX Convenience Benchmarking Database shows cigarettes’ share of inside sales declining from 29.5% to 18.0%, while OTP grew from 5.5% to 9.4% over the tracked period. Source: NACS CSX Convenience Benchmarking Database.
  • OTP shoppers are unusually frequent, high-value visitors. OTP purchasers visit convenience stores roughly 13 times per week and spend an average of $9.19 per visit — nearly double the average shopper’s visit frequency. Source: CSP Daily News.

These are national, industry-wide figures — not GPO Plus figures, and not segmented by chain size. Use them as the trend line, not as a stand-in benchmark for your own stores.

A framework for benchmarking your own OTP category

Because no external source segments OTP performance by chain size, the practical move for a 5-35 store operator is to benchmark your own stores against themselves over time, and against the national trend direction above — not against a borrowed small-chain number that does not actually exist. Five steps:

1. Calculate your own OTP gross margin, by subsegment

Pull your own POS/scan data and calculate gross margin percentage separately for each OTP subsegment — cigars, smokeless, modern oral nicotine pouches, vapor, and heated tobacco — rather than treating “OTP” as one blended number. Compare each subsegment’s margin against your legacy cigarette margin. The subsegments behave differently: modern oral nicotine pouches and vapor typically carry structurally higher margins than legacy cigarettes, while cigar and traditional smokeless margins vary more by supplier program.

2. Track OTP’s share of your total in-store gross profit over time

Calculate what percentage of your store’s total in-store gross profit comes from OTP versus cigarettes, quarter over quarter. The national trend line above shows OTP crossing cigarettes at roughly 6.7% versus 6.6% of gross profit as of the most recent NACS data. Whether your own stores are ahead of, behind, or tracking that inflection point tells you more about your category health than any external chain-size number would.

3. Compare your OTP shopper visit frequency and basket size against the CSP benchmark

If your POS or loyalty system can isolate OTP purchasers, compare their visit frequency and average spend against the roughly 13-visits-per-week, $9.19-per-visit national figure above. This is a directional check, not a pass/fail test — a small independent operator’s local customer base will not match a national average exactly, but a large, sustained gap in either direction is worth investigating.

4. Ask your distributor or category-management partner these questions directly

  • Can you show me my OTP margin broken out by subsegment, not blended into one number?
  • Directionally, how does my OTP mix compare to your other small-chain (5-35 store) accounts?
  • What is your restock and compliance-monitoring cadence for nicotine pouches and vapor, given how fast PMTA status and state vapor-product-directory laws are moving?
  • Do you have a planogram recommendation specific to my store format, or only a generic whole-category layout?

A distributor or category-management partner who cannot answer the first question — margin by subsegment, not blended — is giving you less visibility than the free national trend data above already provides.

5. Judge “good” by direction and trajectory, not a borrowed number

Since no one publishes a free, chain-size-segmented OTP benchmark, the honest standard for a small operator is: is your OTP category moving in the same direction as the national trend (gaining gross-profit share, attracting frequent shoppers), and at a pace that makes sense for your own store mix and market? That is a real, defensible benchmark. A specific external dollar figure presented as your peer-group average — when no free source actually produces one — is not.

Keep the underlying rules in view

OTP compliance moves fast: PMTA status, state vapor-product-directory laws, and flavor restrictions change regularly at the federal, state, and sometimes county level. Any margin or performance benchmarking exercise should be paired with a compliance check on the products actually driving that margin, since a strong-margin SKU that falls out of compliance stops being a strong-margin SKU immediately.

How GPO Plus’s OTP Program fits in

GPO Plus launched its OTP Program on July 8, 2026, to help convenience store and gas station retailers manage the OTP category across the product lines discussed above. If you would rather apply this framework with a distribution and category-management partner than build the tracking yourself, see GPO Plus’s OTP Program for what that partnership covers. This page is meant to help you ask better questions and read your own numbers more clearly, whether or not GPO Plus ends up being the partner you choose.

For the physical shelf and product-mix side of the same category, see GPO Plus’s OTP planogram guide.

Last updated August 2026. Figures above are cited to NACS Magazine, the NACS CSX Convenience Benchmarking Database, and CSP Daily News as noted inline; none of the trend figures on this page are GPO Plus’s own data.