Our Story
Guillermo Rico could well be Honduras’s most underestimated cigar maker. Combining old traditions with fully vertical operations, the producer of Gran Habano and 3 SLS cigars has brought a unique cultural twist to premium cigars through his GR Tabaqueras Unidas farming operations.
A third-generation tobacco producer and cigar maker, Don Guillermo Rico believes in patience. Building his business slowly and steadily through careful exposure of his cigars to the marketplace, his hallmark is attention to detail and a high reliance on strict quality control in traditional tabaquero fashion. “The greatest shortcoming I see with many cigars is a lack of consistency, in both the processing of the tobaccos and in construction,” he says. “Bunchers are not sufficiently trained, or they aren’t concerned with exact placement of the ligero in the center of the bunch, which causes off-center burns.” Perhaps even worse, notes Rico, is when bunchers fail to follow the master blender’s recipe, which calls for exact proportions of each leaf in the overall blend.
Considering his background, such attention to detail is hardly a surprise – Rico’s family history in tobacco stretches back to 1920, when his grandfather began growing dark tobacco. His father succeeded him in 1946, and Don Guillermo recalls following him around the fields as a lad and his mother rolling cigars at home. Both his grandfather and father provided tobacco exclusively for domestic consumption through the 1950s and ’60s. And Don Guillermo, like many other tobacco men from tobacco families, took up the business too – that is, until moving from his homeland to the United States in 1995, where he worked as a cabinetmaker in New Jersey. In 1995, he began taking orders for cigar boxes, and saw the boom in sales of raw material to the cigar companies headquartered in Florida. His passion was rekindled, and he founded his own company and pursued his dream once again.
Under the company name of GR Tabaqueras Unidas, Rico sold his leaf not only to Miami-headquartered cigar makers, but also to the Oliva family, noted leaf brokers in Tampa’s Ybor City. He operated this successful business until 1998, when he went into the cigar manufacturing business himself.
In 1998, Don Guillermo opened a factory in Danlí, Honduras where he developed his new line of premium cigars in bundles and sold them to America’s horde of new cigar devotees. He also landed private label cigar customers, and in the 10 years following, the factory’s work force has expanded to 250 – 300 workers and output grown to 15,000 cigars daily. Don Guillermo continued to purchase his own farms, one each in Panama, Nicaragua’s Jalapa Valley, Colombia, and Costa Rica, an emerging hotbed of tobacco, with major holdings by Nestor Plasencia and others. With four farms and a factory in place, he now had control of growing, leaf processing, manufacturing, and marketing – from seed to finished product.
In 2003, Don Guillermo introduced his Gran Habano family of long-filler, handmade cigars. The brand consists of five blends: Blend #1, a mild but rich cigar with a Connecticut shade wrapper; Blend #3, a medium-bodied cigar in Habano wrapper; Blend #5, a peppery, full-bodied cigar in Corojo wrapper; 3 SLS, another full-bodied cigar with a shade-grown Nicaraguan wrapper and the Gran Habano Cabinet Selection, also full-bodied, with a Nicaraguan Corojo wrapper. Don Guillermo uses tobacco from all four countries where he farms, and talks about a special leaf he favors for inclusion in most of his blends. “Cubito leaf is much like Mexican-seed tobacco,” he says. “I find it has great taste, aroma, and power. Although they use it some in the Dominican Republic, most people don’t know how to process it correctly, and this makes blending it difficult. Our method is to press the leaves in barrels, knowing the process is complete when all the moisture has disappeared.”
Don Guillermo insists on consistency in the finished cigars. “Hard-drawing cigars and plugs result from overfilling the bunch,” he explains. “We eliminate the draw problems – a top complaint by smokers – by testing every cigar that comes off our bunchers’ benches with Drawmaster machines.”
Every bunch is draw-tested before wrapping. Finished cigars are inspected carefully at multiple stages of the production process. Gran Habano Cigars, like many cigar companies, is headquartered in Miami, with office staff and a warehouse from which they ship product to their retailers.
“I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to the many store owners who were willing to try my cigars. My representatives also deserve my appreciation for their dedicated efforts on our behalf. Together, they had faith in me, and have helped me to stay in the business I love. Every day, I go to work in anticipation of another day. When I close the door at night, I am still refreshed, never tired, although my staff and I work very hard. I do not see myself ever retiring. I believe I would soon die if I could not create my cigars.”
