Small businesses, side by side.

The Small Independent Cigar Alliance began with a group of California cigar retailers, lounge owners, and small makers who 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. The state enforces it in part through the Unflavored Tobacco List. For cigars that are not exempt, the manufacturer or importer has to register the product before a retailer can sell it. Retailers can't file that registration themselves. Many small, family-run makers, here and abroad, haven't completed it. By mid-2026, only about one in five of the manufacturers the state expected had registered. That leaves genuinely unflavored cigars off the shelf because of paperwork the shop can't file.Figures as of mid-2026, drawn from the state's public Unflavored Tobacco List (utl.doj.ca.gov), measured against the state's own rulemaking estimate of the manufacturers it expected.

It's a fixable, technical gap, and closing it is the whole reason we came together.

Ready to forward: the issue, in short