About Us
Small businesses, side by side.
The California Independent Cigar Alliance started in 2025. A group of California cigar retailers, lounge owners, and small makers kept hitting the same wall: a well-meant law was landing in a way no one intended, and nobody was speaking for the small businesses caught in the middle.
California's flavored-tobacco law is meant to keep flavored products away from kids. We support that. To enforce it, the state built a registration system called the Unflavored Tobacco List, and a cigar has to be registered by its manufacturer before anyone can sell it. Retailers can't register products themselves; only the maker can. And many small, family-run makers, here and abroad, haven't managed to get registered. By mid-2026, only about one in five of the manufacturers the state expected had signed up. So a genuinely unflavored premium cigar gets treated as if it were flavored, and it's the compliant local shop that pays for it.
It's a fixable, technical gap, and closing it is the whole reason we came together.
Ready to forward: the issue, in short
What We Stand For
We support the law. Keeping flavored products away from kids is the right call, and we want the system to work the way it was meant to.
We show our sources. Every claim we make traces back to the statute, the agencies, or the public record.
Independents only. Our members are family-owned — the lounge on the corner, the shop downtown, the small makers and growers who keep them stocked.
Who Belongs
California cigar retailers and lounges. Independent and family-owned manufacturers. The growers and small makers who supply the state. And the enthusiasts and lawmakers who want California's independent cigar tradition to survive alongside good regulation.