Virginias américains

Kevin: How do you manage your tobacco leaf supplies? For example, there must be specific types of leaf required for different blends, so what happens if you can’t get a certain leaf? Do you stop production or do you make a substitute? Do you run into situations where there’s competition for certain varietals?

Craig: Yes. Let me answer one at a time.
The leaf will change. I mean, the 2001 crop is the 2001 crop. When that’s gone, it’s gone. So we’re very careful about the next; let’s take Bright Virginia as an example. When we buy Bright Virginia, we decide on a particular crop year because of its taste and its color and any number of factors. We reserve as much as we can of it; maybe 25, 30 cases of it. When that’s gone, then we have to find something that matches it and we try and match by sugar content, nicotine content, color, and most of all, taste, and I really don’t like to do it, but we have to to continue the blends. It’s what I term a burnt tongue day when I have to go down to smoke the raw tobacco.
We use a major supplier for our tobacco who can match, or come very close to what we’re running out of. They keep 25 million pounds on hand at all times.
Color … sometimes we’re in competition with color, particularly with the Chinese. If it’s bright, they’ll buy it. The brighter the better and so sometimes it’s very hard to get a very Bright Virginia, because they’ve been into the warehouses and bought all of the very bright stuff. It’s not because bright stuff is better, it’s just that it looks better to the Chinese. Some very bright stuff is very hot and in fact, we use some of it as scrap.

Kevin: So that is a situation where you run into some competition for certain varietals of tobacco.

Craig: Yes, but not real competition. There’s enough tobacco out there that we can pretty much match it and now tobacco comes from all over the world.

Kevin: Where does your tobacco come from geography-wise?

Craig: From all over the world. Of course, Latakia comes from Cypress and Perique comes from St. James Parish. The United States is primary, but we get leaf from Canada, Brazil, and from East Africa, wherever we can match or come close to matching what we had before.
Speaking of matching, we refuse to match a blend that’s on the market. It’s almost impossible to do, even to match an old blend. We have no idea what tobacco is in it, what it tasted like raw, what they’ve put on it as a topping, which doesn’t have to be a flavor. A topping doesn’t have to be a flavor