With tobacco companies struggling to continue in a receding industry, executives are turning to inventive e-cigarette flavors to attract customers.

The announcement Tuesday that Reynolds American had bought Lorillard marked a merging two of the country's largest tobacco businesses. This decision also shed light on how much even industry giants are fighting to stay alive as traditional cigarettes give way to popular e-cigarettes. Both companies are steering heavily toward new e-cigarette products, specifically introducing many new flavors of vapor.

In 2009, a ban was placed on exotic flavored cigarettes, with names like Mintrigue and Twista Lime, over concern that these names would attract young people to smoking. However, these attempts are dwarfed by the wide, legal array of e-cigarette varieties flooding the market.

More than 7,000 flavors of e-cigarettes are available, and around 250 new varieties are being rolled out every month, according to one estimate. This amount of selection is light-years beyond what tobacco companies ever had with cigarettes.

With new tastes such as "Black and Blue Berry" from the company NJOY, or retailers like Viking Vapor offering hundreds of e-cigarette refill flavors that come in everything from "Apple Pie" to "Buttered Popcorn," concerns from regulators were immediately raised about the appeal these flavors would have on children.

"It defies logic to think that such flavors would not make e-cigarette use more appealing and even normal for children," James Pankow, a chemistry professor at Portland State University in Oregon, said.

Other critics argue that tobacco companies are falling back into their same tactics that resulted in the ban on flavored cigarettes in 2009.

NJOY's chief executive Craig Weiss, in an effort to staunch fears, funded a study to determine if e-cigarette flavors did appeal to young nonsmokers. The online survey was conducted by Saul Shiffman of the University of Pittsburgh and found that while adults were more attracted to e-cigarettes due to the flavors, they had little appeal to young people.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, said these results are not surprising considering Weiss and NJOY paid for the research.

"Let me be as dismissive as possible: When they start talking about their own research, I say 'been there, done that,'" Mr. Durbin said in an interview. "We listened to those tobacco companies for decades while their so-called experts tried to divert our attention from the obvious."