1 of 6
Woodland Craft cigarettes, “the world’s only eco-conscious cigarette brand.” Credit: Smokey Treats.
2 of 6
Adam van Wyngaarden, founder and c.e.o. of South Africa’s Smokey Treats (Pty) Ltd. Credit: Smokey Treats (Pty) Ltd.
3 of 6
Roger Koch, creator of “Heimat”. Credit: Koch & Gsell A
4 of 6
Heimat Tobacco & Hemp. Credit: Koch & Gsell AG
5 of 6
Hestia craft cigarettes. Credit: Hestia Tobacco LLC
6 of 6
Hestia Tobacco’s David Sley posing with his brainchild. Credit: Hestia Tobacco LLC
Though faced by overwhelming competition from “big tobacco”, craft cigarettes have carved out very individual niches for themselves. Tobacco Asia talked to three companies.
Craft beers. Craft sodas. Craft cheeses. Craft spirits. Craft cured meats. Craft chocolates. Craft breads. The list could go on almost indefinitely. Craft – or “artisan” – products are in vogue, no doubt about it. Enthusiastically embraced by increasing numbers of consumers, they offer something extraordinary away from industrially manufactured items. As so many consumer products nowadays bestow themselves with the “craft” attribute, it would be surprising if there were not “craft cigarettes”, too. Well, there are. But, what makes a cigarette “craft” as opposed to “commercial”?
What is a “craft cigarette”?
Adam van Wyngaarden, founder and c.e.o. of South African outfit Smokey Treats (Pty) Ltd., had a fabulously descriptive definition right at his fingertips: “A ‘craft cigarette’ is not manufactured by ‘big tobacco’, but typically a smaller company in relatively low volumes, so extra attention can be devoted to achieving an ultra-high quality and very special product. However, even more importantly, there must be something distinctively different about the product. I don’t mean some fancy packaging, but the raw materials for constructing the stick... If you cannot infuse your product with some innovation, all you’ve got is just another ‘small-company cigarette brand’ – and that’s not nearly as cool as a ‘craft’ one.”
How consumers identify themselves also seems to carry considerable weight, according to David Sley, founder and c.e.o. of American firm Hestia Tobacco LLC. As the creator of the almost iconic “Hestia” brand, he explained that “on average, Hestia customers only smoke half a pack a week, which is much less than the one-pack-per-day a regular smoker is likely to consume.” He reasoned that Hestia buyers, therefore, did not identify as smokers per se, but rather see themselves as connoisseurs of an “excellent, natural, and additive-free tobacco product.” In other words: For many consumers craft cigarettes are as much a status symbol as they are a fashion statement.
Delving into the “craft product aficionado mindset”Roger Koch, co-founder and c.e.o. of Swiss company Koch & Gsell AG (see “Flora Growth to Acquire Koch & Gsell” news on p.32.) delved still deeper into the mindset of the craft product aficionado. “Craft product consumers generally act very consciously when it comes to their product choices,” he said. That also extends to tobacco. “Being very selective on a personal level, they carefully ponder what they want to smoke. That’s why they choose a product that clearly distinguishes itself from mass-produced brands.”
The decision-making process is not always based on consumption considerations alone, but often enough also aims at some sort of self-staging. “Will I be perceived in a more positive light by my peers if I smoke tobacco brand X instead of the run-of-the-mill brand Y?” According to Koch, this is a crucial question that resonates with a large proportion of craft cigarette consumers.
However, there also is the “personal relationship“ that craft cigarette makers generally have forged with their brand. While initially conceived for themselves and to share with a limited circle of friends, that relationship persist even the brand eventually “goes commercial.”
“By contrast, mass-produced ‘big brand’ cigarettes were foremost designed to generate maximum profits at minimum cost,” said Koch. “Our brand, on the other hand, is the result of a pronounced, highly personal creation process. The love and appreciation we put into later also rubbed off on our customers once we began marketing our brand, Heimat, on a broader commercial scale, yet at still relatively small volumes.”
Hestia: An “over-drinks dare” with positive consequences
The two patterns of “personal relationship with the product” and “cottage industry to modest commercial enterprise” echo with Sley and van Wyngaarden as well. Sley was first introduced to craft cigarettes when he was in law school. “I often smoked a very flavorful independent brand called Marshall McGearty’s back then,” he recalled. “They had a little shop in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood that I used to frequent. Sadly, both the brand and storefront eventually disappeared.” But, Sley’s appreciation of craft cigarettes stuck.
A few years after graduating Sley ran into a handful of former organic tobacco farmer in Valdosta, Georgia, who had since switched to growing soybeans. “Over drinks, I dared a few of them to grow some organic tobacco for me – and if they did I promised to start a [craft cigarette] brand,” he recounted. “They accepted the challenge and one year later I had more organic tobacco at my hands than I knew what to do with.” Of course, Sley lived up to his part of the dare, founding what is today Hestia Tobacco LLC.
Woodland: 60 years of innovation stagnation sparked to an idea
Adam van Wyngaarden’s passion for craft cigarettes likewise stems from his college years – although his motivation hailed from a completely different corner. “While taking a smoke break on our campus one day in 2015, Smokey Treats’ co-founder Davide Scott, and I couldn’t help but notice just how many cigarette butts were littering the ground,” he said. After a bit of research the duo discovered that conventional cigarette butts are made of non-biodegradable mono-acetate tow. They also were quite flustered to learn that acetate filter plugs are indeed the most littered single-use plastic on the planet – and one of the biggest contributors to aquatic micro-plastic pollution.
“Dismayed by the lack of innovation in combustible cigarettes for the past 60odd years, we decided to do something about it,” van Wyngaarden told Tobacco Asia. The two friends soon came up with what van Wyngaarden described as “biodegradable, organic rollies” that they personally put together and packaged at home, peddling them at local music festivals in 2015. They sold like hotcakes. “That made us realize the huge demand for [such a product] among more environmentally concerned smokers.” Adam van Wyngaarden had had his proverbial eureka moment.
Following three years of intensive, entirely self-financed r&d, Scott and van Wyngaarden officially launched Woodland Craft Cigarettes in December of 2018 as “the world’s first eco cigarette brand.” “Unlike regular brands, Woodland uses plastic-free, 100% biodegradable [paper] filters,” explained van Wyngaarden. “And rather than ‘conditioning’ our tobacco with more than 600 chemicals, we use no artificial additives at all,” he claimed, adding that even the cigarette paper is entirely unbleached.
The brand’s environmentally friendly aspect extends to the packaging, too. It is unbleached and non-laminated and only printed with food-grade organic inks derived from soybeans. All tobacco used in Woodland is sustainably grown locally. Moreover, Smokey Treats donates 1% of net profits to reforestation projects in southern Africa. “This is our bid to try and compensate for the whopping 4% of global deforestation that the tobacco industry reportedly is responsible for,” van Wyngaarden pointed out.
Heimat and the smallest ecological footprint
Meanwhile, over in Switzerland, Roger Koch’s call to the craft cigarette banner literally was decades in the making. He had witnessed the steady decline of Switzerland’s once burgeoning tobacco-growing sector. But, he also saw his country being swamped with mass-produced brands. “I was convinced that Swiss tobacco was actually not bad, that it deserved a much better reputation and could be used in an ‘indigenous’ cigarette product.”
Koch admitted that this desire to utilize Swiss tobacco – and in the process help revive a dying agricultural sector – was the initial driver behind the development of Heimat. The brand name he chose alludes to that, too – Heimat literally translates as “homeland”. That Heimat, more by chance than planned design, also would turn out as the cigarette brand with the “smallest ecological footprint” currently available in Switzerland was “a nice and important side effect,” according to Koch.
However, the fact that the entire Heimat portfolio today exclusively uses 100% biodegradable cellulose filter plugs supplied by German company McAirlaid’s certainly suggests that Koch spun that “accidental” initial eco friendliness further. “The plugs further reinforce our craft cigarette claim and also go to show that we are not oblivious to the [acetate tow] waste and littering problem and that even a small company like ours can do its part to help improve that situation,” he said.
Certain flavor and aroma fluctuations are quite inherent to “real” craft cigarettes. This has to do with the use of unadulterated, additive-free tobacco that is craft cigarettes’ common hallmark. For instance, Sley explained that his customers may “notice slight flavor variations from one crop year to the next.” “We don’t add [industrially-produced] flavorings to achieve 100% flavor consistency, but let nature prevail. This is an intended feature of the ‘Hestia adventure’, not a production flaw,” he insisted.
While he also pointed out that his supplying farmers were growing their tobacco organically, Sley nevertheless admitted that it is not “USDA certified”. “We could get that certification, no doubt about it, but it would be an added expense that we do not want to pass on to the consumer,” he reasoned. “Our loyal customers trust us to deliver the best, and thus far we have not disappointed them.”
Virginia, burley... and hemp, too
Both Hestia and Woodland currently only are available in one single blend. In the case of the former, it is a typical American blend of exclusively American South-grown and cured burley and virginia tobaccos. And Smokey Treats’ Woodland utilizes what van Wyngaarden calls “a modified virginia blend,” which he says, “better caters for the South African smokers’ preference.” Koch’s Heimat on the other hand is quite a bit more diversified, coming in a stronger “dark” and a lighter “bright” variety. And, yes, since Switzerland liberalized her cannabis legislation in early 2016, Heimat has even become available “tobacco & hemp” – though only with a tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentration of not more than 1% as prescribed by Swiss law.
Marketing a product in a broader scope is of course an entirely different ballgame from selling home-made cigarettes at college campuses or music festivals. Hestia predominantly sticks to the US online market, “but is also shipping globally,” as Sley remarked. Yet, distribution continues to be a “white whale” for the brand. “We are always on the lookout for distribution partners,” he said. However, he also pointed out that the brand has been growing organically since its launch, even having found some distribution success in Hong Kong and the North Africa region.
“In terms of sheer volume, Hestia is dwarfed by every single mainstream international brand,” Sley said. “But getting big has never been our focus nor our goal. We are glad to provide folks with the exciting product that they’ve been searching for, and we are delighted to helping out independent tobacco farmers in the process, too.”
The EU, a hard nut to crack
Meanwhile, Heimat is represented “in all large Swiss supermarket chains, such as Co-op, Denner, Volg, and Valora,” according to Koch. “We have established ourselves as a truly independent brand and are also perceived as such by our customers.” Demand in neighboring Germany also would be potentially phenomenal – if only Switzerland were a European Union (EU) member state and, thus, had implemented a mandatory track-and-trace system for tobacco products. “We still could export to Germany, but our products would be levied with 57.6 % import tax, making it impossible for us to stay competitive,” elaborated Koch.
And there is another snag, this time concerning Heimat’s “tobacco & hemp” variety. Products containing tobacco and cannabis blends (and regardless of their actual THC content) are still prohibited everywhere in the EU. Oddly, that doesn’t apply to pure hemp cigarettes in certain EU countries (and as long as the THC content remains within the legally prescribed threshold). Following Switzerland’s cannabis liberalization, Koch & Gsell AG has indeed been manufacturing and marketing 100% pure hemp cigarettes as well, in fact creating the world’s very first commercially available hemp cigarette brand. “But so far we have only succeeded to gain a distribution foothold in Luxembourg and Belgium,” Koch explained.
First South Africa, then the world!
Smokey Treats’ currently is only marketed in South Africa, albeit to enormous success. “Woodland Craft Cigarette is the fastest growing cigarette brand in South Africa’s premium segment,” claimed van Wyngaarden. And his future plans are big. “We’ll change the world. As the 21st century consumer inevitably becomes more environmentally conscious, it’s only a matter of time before the industry is forced to cater for this type of new, modern, sophisticated smoker.” To facilitate that, Smokey Treats is eager to attract potential distributors who “think that there is a market for Woodland Craft Cigarettes in [their] country.” And van Wyngaarden’s ultimate ambition? “World domination,” he smirked, laconically. Now... that’s crafty!