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Gran Habano Cigars

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 Tabacaleras Unidas farming operations.

A third-generation tobacco producer and cigar maker, 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 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 Mr. Rico, 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.