Caring for cigar producing communities and the environment: the right thing to do. End of!
Business used to be profit at all cost (some seem to still think it is!), but consumers have begun to demand more, rightly so. Our ethics are our conscience, they keep us anchored to a reality. Yes, we have to make a profit to have a business, but the UK Cigar Industry can no longer ignore reality, it takes products from some of the poorest economies in the world, makes very, very good profits on them and gives almost nothing back. It's quite possible your cigar was rolled by someone who went home last night and had to boil water, just to be able to drink it... It's why we're taking a stand. We're leading the way on supporting charities, leading the way on environmental standards and we're hoping the rest of the industry rises to the challenge as well !
Supporting the cigar producing community
If you've ever been lucky enough to holiday in any of the New World Cigar producing countries and left your resort you will, like I have, seen the conditions people live in. Let's be honest, it ain't clever. We could concern ourselves with the politics of these countries, but let's not, let's instead concern ourselves with the people. In the Dominican Republic around 1/3 of the population live on an average of 1.25 USD per day. Life is hard, many of the things that we take for granted like clean tapped water and access to adequate healthcare are not a given. Opportunities for children to achieve and reach their potential are limited against this background of social and financial hardship.
We are proud to support the Cigar Family Charitable Foundation. That's right, it costs you nothing to help ensure some of the poorest children in the Dominican Republic have access to education. While the rest of the industry in the UK continues to profit at cigar producing countries' expense, we are proud to be giving something back!
You can read more here about the work this fantastic charity does https://cf-cf.org/
Carbon neutral, you better believe it!
You're never going to see me at an Extinction Rebellion event, but that doesn't mean I don't believe in doing all we can as a business to make us as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible. You may never have thought about it, but every cigar you smoke has flown at least 4000 miles, every trip I make to the Americas, 8-10000 miles. It adds up pretty quickly, and that's before we get to the sheer amount of packaging we go through. From day 1, all our packaging (with the exception of ziplock bags) has been recycled or recyclable. That sets us apart from the rest of the industry. Now we've gone further, much further. Working with CarbonFund we have calculated (using their calculator) our environmental impact and brought sufficient Carbon credits to offset it. The credits we purchased will be used to fund their work across a range of environmental programmes. You can find out more here https://carbonfund.org/