General Cigar Company
business
General Cigar Company is the largest manufacturer of premium cigars in the world. It is a subsidiary of Scandinavian Tobacco Group with North American headquarters located in Richmond, Virginia.
Company history
In 1961 General Cigar, which was profitably selling about $30 million worth of cigars annually, was purchased for approximately $25 million by a group of investors headed by Edgar M. Cullman (brother of then Philip Morris Company CEO Joseph Cullman), a fourth generation American in the tobacco industry.
Later in the 1960s, Culbro and General Cigar acquired Gradiaz Annis, maker of Gold Label cigars and the Temple Hall factory that owned the Macanudo brand name, ushering in a turn towards hand-rolled premium cigars. Macanudo, a small label made in limited quantities for the market in the United Kingdom, was seen as the principal vehicle for growth in the premium cigar category. A careful effort was made to reblend the product for the large American marketplace (then and now subject to a ban on Cuban tobacco, the industry's gold standard) using select binder and filler from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Mexico and Connecticut shade-grown wrapper. Mass advertising was conducted in support of the brand, which by the early 1990s had grown into the best selling premium cigar label in the United States.
In 1978 General registered a U.S. trademark on the brand name "Cohiba", thereby obtaining the right to use the name of that premium Cuban cigar in the American market without any connection to or content provided by its Cuban maker. Protracted legal wrangling followed, resolved when the U. S. Supreme Court denied the petition of the Cuban tobacco marketing agency, Cubatabaco, in 2006. General Cigar's Cohiba cigars bear a disclaimer stating that they are not affiliated in any way with the Cuban Cohiba brand.
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This entry incorporates text from “General Cigar Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.