Flavored Cigar Sales Strong

Despite a demand from adult consumers, tobacco retailers are continually forced to defend their right to sell flavored cigars responsibly. While tobacco has long been a bread-and-butter product for convenience stores, accounting for millions in individual unit sales and boosting the profits from the average smoker’s market basket, it remains a category under attack at the federal and state levels. Consistent tax increases and society’s dim view of smoking, which has resulted in a spate of anti-tobacco legislation, have hurt overall sales and profits.
These efforts have also caused c-stores lose regular adult consumers that enjoy discount Cafe Creme cigars To keep tobacco sales strong and steady, retailers have turned to flavored cigars, which have seen a spike in demand since federal regulations outlawed flavored cigarettes. But even here storm clouds are gathering, warned Thomas Briant, executive director of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO) in Minneapolis.
Briant is concerning himself with a pair of recent ordinances—one in Providence, R.I., that bans all flavored tobacco products, including all flavored cigars, and another in Miami-Dade County in Florida, that would also place a ban on all flavored tobacco products. Why target flavored cigars specifically? Briant said the answer may be that the newest ordinances are viewed as an extension of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) ban on flavored cigarettes.
“The advocates claim—although we don’t believe there is any scientific data to back it up—that flavored cigars are attractive to underage youths,” Briant said. “But we have statistics showing underage youths smoking flavored cigars at a very low rate, much lower than even cheap cigarettes . We don’t believe there is an important concern regarding that, but they believe there is, so we’re responding to that ordinance.”
“The FDA and individual states have really come down hard on carding,” said Andrea Myers, executive vice president of Kocolene Marketing LLC. “I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but it’s pretty hard for teenagers to get their hands on tobacco, at least in our shops.”
The FDA’s prohibit on flavored cigs in 2009 opened the door for both little and large cigars to capture that flavored niche. For example, Djarum clove cigarettes were banned under the FDA ruling. The company, like many others, re-blended and changed the product to become a filtered cigar, while maintaining the flavor profile customers enjoyed. The change from cigarettes, which are inhaled, to filtered cigars, which generally are not, took a while for consumers to adapt to.