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THE WORLD'S LARGEST CIGAR FACTORY |
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Page 1 of 2  Plus: Our Register & Win winner of the week
Los Angeles, March 5 – “Our ability to work together in good and bad times.”
That’s one of the things that Jose Seijas, Altadis U.S.A.’s Vice President and General Manager of the Tabacalera de Garcia (pictured), is proudest of in his long tenure at the world’s largest cigar factory.
During the Cigar Boom period of the mid-to-late 1990s, the factory peaked at a high of 5,600 workers, but shrank all the way down to 2,000 when boom turned to bust. Now, the facility, which encompasses more than 300,000 sq. ft. in four enormous buildings, has 3,800 staff members and turns out 35-40 million handmade cigars per year and 300 million machine-made cigars a year.
During an interview and tour yesterday, Seijas not only demonstrated the production process, but noted some little-appreciated aspects of the Altadis U.S.A. procedures:
The machine-made factory never closes. It runs three shifts per day and seven days a week to satisfy the demand for brands such as Backwoods, a major seller.
The handmade side runs five days a week, nine hours a day from Monday through Thursday and eight hours on Friday in its own building, in which raw materials come in at one end and finished cigars are shipped out at the other. Besides the expected tobacco handling areas, blending areas, rolling rooms, storage facilities and sorting and shipping areas, we also walked through a very busy carpentry area where boxes are made, a print shop for labels and walls of prepared boxes ready to be filled with cigars.
The rolling techniques at the Tabacalera de Garcia are also unique. There are 450 bunchers whose job is to prepare the filler and binder of a specific cigar and place it into a mold, where it is pressed when full. For the more popular lines and shapes – Romeo y Julieta 1875 Bully, for example – a buncher will work only on that specific cigar, full-time, year-round.
Once the bunches come out of the press, they are checked in a proprietary process for weight and draw. We can’t say more, nor were we allowed to take any pictures. But it’s an impressive step in quality control and crucial to Altadis U.S.A.’s success. “In this way, we check the cigars before the wrapper is put on,” said Seijas, noting that by this method, precious (and expensive) wrapper leaf is not wasted.
There are about 650 rollers who will finish the bunch by applying the wrapper. Like with the bunchers, a roller may work continuously on a single shape and size because (1) of the demand for it, (2) to ensure quality through repetition and (3) increase speed.
By splitting the jobs of buncher and roller, Seijas says the average individual production is about 300 cigars a day per person.
Once the cigars are finished, they are assembled in bulks of up to 500 cigars and taken to the “cigar room” to be held for 4-8 weeks. Seijas said “This is where the leaves all reach the same level of humidity,” about 14-15% of its total weight. Some leaves have more and some less when the process starts, but by the end, a 100-pound collection of cigars will have a water content of just about 15 pounds.
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