How we write for Velo Canada
Short version: we sell nicotine pouches, VELO first and plenty of other brands beside it, and anything we write about them is written by the people selling them. We would rather you knew that up front. The rest of this page covers the rules our writing follows, which parts a machine helps with, and what to do when you catch us out.
Nothing is on the blog yet
The blog section of this site is built and empty. We have not published a single guide, review or comparison so far. So treat this page as a promise about the first post and every one after it, rather than a description of a back catalogue.
The pages that do exist today are the shop itself: product pages, brand pages and the help and policy pages. Most of what follows applies to those too.
The byline is the shop
Posts will carry the byline Velo Canada · Editorial Team. That is the business, not a pen name, and the business answers for every word.
You will not see a made-up reviewer with a stock photo and a friendly first name. If a real person on our team ever puts their name to a post, they will have a profile page you can check. Until then the organisation signs it.
And to be plain about it: nobody with medical, pharmacology or legal qualifications has reviewed anything we publish, so please do not take any of it as medical or legal advice.
We write about cans we have opened
A guide here should sound like someone who has had the pouch under their lip, because it will be. We say what we think first. If other buyers disagree, we say that second and explain why.
Everything we recommend gets at least one honest drawback. A list where every entry is perfect is an advert, and you would be right to ignore it.
Tasting notes are opinions. Mint intensity, sweetness, how fast a flavour fades: those are our impressions of a can, and you may well taste it differently. They are not lab readings.
Figures come from the catalogue
Nicotine per pouch, pouch count, can weight and format are read from our product data at the moment a page is built, not typed into the prose from memory. When the shelf changes, the figure on the page follows it.
Where a maker prints a strength without saying what unit it is in, we show the label as the maker wrote it rather than converting it for you. We have not sent any product to a lab, so nothing on this site is a test result of ours.
Writing about Canadian rules sticks to what the government source actually published, with a link to it. We are not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice.
Where code and models come in
Most product pages are assembled by code from each can’s specification sheet, which is why two pages never quote different doses for the same can. Help and policy pages, this one included, are written by hand.
When the blog starts, a language model may help draft or expand a post. If it does, the piece still has to pass the same publishing checks before it can go live:
- A compliance check rejects health or cessation claims, outbound links to other shops and unsupported attributions to third parties.
- A depth check keeps a thin or self-repeating draft unpublished until it is rewritten.
- Our style rules (no filler, first person, a summary and key takeaways at the top) apply whoever or whatever wrote the first draft.
Not every page gets a human read before publishing, and we won’t pretend otherwise. The checks above are mechanical. They catch a banned phrase or a missing number, and they cannot tell a well-sourced post that was not worth writing from a good one. Hand-written pages get human judgement. Generated product pages get guaranteed figures.
Lines we do not cross
- No health benefits claimed for any pouch, and nothing framed as a way to give up tobacco.
- No suggestion that a product has been cleared or endorsed by any regulator.
- Wherever strength comes up, we say that nicotine is addictive. Somebody new to nicotine will not get a first-can suggestion from us.
- No invented quotes and no claims about a named business that we cannot back with something you could check yourself.
We are a shop, and we say so
Every product we write about is something we sell, or something a reader is weighing up against something we sell. We keep VELO front and centre because that is the shop’s focus, and we will still tell you when another brand on our shelf suits a particular taste better.
We run an affiliate programme: partners who send customers our way earn a commission on those orders. No other retailer pays us, and none of our outbound links earn us anything.
Customer reviews
Reviews on this site come from orders we shipped. The link to leave one is tied to the order, and a rating is attached to the exact can that was bought. We read each review before it is published. We hold back personal details, abuse and health claims, and we do not hold back a review for being harsh.
Nobody is paid, discounted or otherwise rewarded for writing a review, and we do not copy reviews in from other sites. A product with no reviews shows no rating at all. Leave one here if you have ordered from us.
Spotted something wrong?
Email team@apollobrands.net with the page address and what is off. We try to answer within one business day.
A wrong figure gets fixed at the source, so every page that used it changes together. If a mistake mattered (a dose, a price, something about the law), the corrected page will say what changed and when. We do not edit a page quietly to make a complaint disappear.
Since nothing has been published on the blog yet, there is nothing to list here so far. The first correction we make to a post will be recorded on this page.