RoMa Craft Tobac

08/26/2026

I continue to see a lot of discussion about cigar prices, tariffs and fairness. Many consumers continue to express the idea that companies should refund tariffs to consumers, and lower prices after IEEPA was struck down and are being refunded.

In one sense, from my perspective as a consumer myself, it is a fair question. But, as a business owner, I also see the other side.

Here's the actual math from our own books.

Between 2021 and 2025 it got 45% more expensive for us to make and land a cigar. Our price went up 9%. We absorbed the difference for four years.

In 2025 we had no choice but to raise the wholesale price 12%. Our cost went up 14% that same year. The increase didn't even catch us up to prior year's costs, much less the new tariffs.

Two-thirds of what hit us is to***co, labor and packaging. The tariff is about a quarter of it, and it showed up last. Most of the damage was done before the first tariff was levied.

The tariffs haven't gone away, either. They changed legal authority three times in sixteen months and sit at 12.5% today with no expiration date in the foreseeable future.

Yes, we received a full refund of the IEEPA tariffs we paid. About 27 cents per imported cigar, one time, against a cost increase of $1.12 that arrives with every shipment. The refund landed in July. The new tariff took effect on 24 July.

I have been criticized for saying that we are not cutting prices, even if all of the tariffs were to be eliminated. Here is the biggest reason why: Every shop that supported us bought inventory at today's cost. Dropping the price would devalue ci**rs they already paid for and already put on the shelf. We won't do that to the people who support us. The other reason should be evident in the numbers. While tariffs were the final straw, the only represent a small part of the overall increase in costs.

We've rarely discounted, never substituted to***co, and never changed a blend to protect a number.

That's what a fair price costs.

Most of you already understand keystone. What doesn't get talked about is that keystone doubles the taxes and the tariffs too.

Every imported cigar carries about 40 cents of federal excise tax. Right now it also carries about 33 cents of tariff. That's 73 cents a cigar that isn't to***co, isn't labor, and isn't anybody's margin. By the time it reaches the counter, keystone has made it a dollar and a half.

So when it feels like prices went up by more than the tariff should have caused, you're right. They did. That's the arithmetic of the shelf, not a decision we made.

It's also part of why your local shop is struggling. They keystone to hold margin percent, so every increase doubles on their shelf. And they're fighting for box sales against online sellers whose volume and vendor concessions they can't match.

Our mission has always been to deliver good ci**rs at a fair price. That hasn't changed.

I cringe every time I see a new cigar released at $20+ and often wonder if I am the one who just doesn't understand the way this industry works.

Personally, and I have stated this many times on podcasts in recent years, I believe retailers should charge more for individual ci**rs consumed in their stores and give even bigger discounts on volume purchases that you make and take home.

Think about a beer. One price at the grocery store, another at a convenience store, another at a bar, another at a high-end lounge, another at the ballpark. Nobody finds that strange. Ci**rs should work the same way.

Consistent with this, we produce ci**rs and sell them in a way that supports this strategy despite rising costs. Ci**rs that punch way above their weight at keystone, that deliver at the higher in-store price and are an even better deal when a consumer commits to making them their everyday cigar.

What we ask in return is that you continue to support our retail partners and our brands that they support day in and day out.

I myself will indulge in the occasional over-priced cigar, but the core of my support goes to companies like ours.

Thank you for doing the same and reaffirming our choice to put enduring quality and value ahead of short-term profit.

*Price data is our wholesale revenue per cigar across all brands. Price reductions shown here reflect a shift in our mix to lower priced ci**rs, not a reduction in the price of any individual cigar. We have never lowered prices.

07/29/2026

Tariffs and ci**rs — what has actually happened, from someone who wires the money to pay them.

There's a lot of noise out there about tariffs right now, and a lot of it is wrong/incomplete. Some of it is intimidating if you don't know how the machinery works. So here's the plain version, start to finish, no spin, as I understand it (and I have done my best to understand it).

How a tariff actually works.

A tariff is a tax on the import value of the ci**rs (the price the factory charges), not what retailer buys them for and not what you pay at the shop. It is paid by the importer of record when the ci**rs clear customs, not by the factory and not by you at the counter. In many cases, not even directly by the brand. It shows up on a CBP Form 7501, the entry summary that reports the classification, the country of origin, and the duty owed.[1] That last part matters, because a lot of the misinformation online comes from people who don't understand the difference between a Certificate of Origin and a 7501. A Certificate of Origin just says where the ci**rs were made. It is not proof that no tariff was paid. The 7501 is where the tariff gets paid, and it gets paid.

The timeline, IEEPA to today.

It started in April 2025 with the IEEPA "reciprocal" tariffs set at 10% across the board, and Nicaragua later pushed to 18%. In February 2026 the Supreme Court struck those down and ruled the President couldn't impose them under that law. The IEEPA tariffs were terminated on February 24, 2026.[2]

The same day, a temporary replacement went in under Section 122 — a flat 10% on Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras — good until it expired by statute, after 150 days, in late July.[3]

On July 24, 2026, that was replaced again, this time under Section 301, and that's where we are today. Ci**rs from Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic are at 12.5%. Ci**rs from Honduras and Mexico stayed at 10%.[3][4]

That's the whole arc. 10%, briefly 18% on Nicaragua, back to a flat 10%, now 12.5% for us. Not the doomsday numbers you may have seen, something we legitimately feared before the first Section 301 actions were announced on December 10th, 2025.

There are two different Section 301 actions, and people often confuse them. They are not the same thing, and conflating them is how misinformation spreads.

The most recent is the one I just described: the July 24, 2026 forced-labor action covering about 60 countries. That's the tariff we actually pay on imports today: 12.5% on Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, 10% on Honduras and Mexico. Ci**rs are not carved out of it. Everybody importing pays it.[3][4]

The former is a Nicaragua-only action from December 10, 2025, with a pretext tied to concerns about Nicaragua's labor and human-rights record. Initially, there was real fear of a 100% tariff and even the possibility that Nicaragua would be formally withdrawn from CAFTA-DR. That did not happen. What it actually does is phase in a tariff on Nicaraguan goods. 0% now, 10% in January 2027, 15% in January 2028, but only on goods that do NOT originate under the CAFTA-DR trade agreement.[5][6]

Here's why that distinction matters for us. Our ci**rs do originate under CAFTA-DR, so we are exempt from that second action entirely, including the increase scheduled for next January. But, and this is the part that some are getting wrong, CAFTA-DR does not make our ci**rs tariff-free today. We still pay the 12.5% from the more recent action. A Certificate of Origin showing CAFTA preference does not insulate importers from this tariff. The tariff we pay and the exemption we qualify for both show up in our CBP paperwork, and just like the $.4026 Federal Excise Tax on Large Ci**rs, in the bill we must pay to clear customs.

So, plainly: we now pay 12.5%. As of now, we do not get hit by the January increase even though those are two different tariffs under the same section of the law.

How the industry handled it, and why prices moved more than the tariff.

Brands took different paths. Some added the tariff as a straight line-item fee on every invoice. Some ate part of it and passed the rest along as a price increase. Some passed the whole thing on. There's no single "cigar tariff" number on a shelf tag, which is part of why this has gotten confusing.

Here's the part that gets lost: whatever a brand passes on at wholesale usually gets roughly doubled by the time it hits the retail price. That's just how retail markup works. So a small increase upstream can look like a big one at the counter even when the tariff itself is a few percent of the import value.

Where RoMa Craft Tobac stands.

We've absorbed most of it and passed on as little as we could. Most of our increases have been under 5%. A handful of SKUs went higher.[7] We made those calls knowing that anything we pass along gets doubled downstream, and we didn't want our customers carrying that.

Two things have worked in our favor. First, the IEEPA tariffs we paid in 2025 were refundable after the Supreme Court ruling, and those refunds have now been refunded to us in full. Second, the FDA "user fee" on premium ci**rs ended in April 2026 after the court reaffirmed that premium ci**rs aren't covered.[8] That savings roughly offsets the bump from 10% to 12.5%. So the move to the current rate is close to a wash for us.

As far as the questions we have received about rolling back prices if the tariffs were ended, I give the same answer we gave halfwheel in 2025:

Martin says that if the tariffs were removed, RoMa Craft would not lower prices. This is likely to be the strategy that most cigar companies take—halfwheel is unaware of a company that lowered prices with the removal of FDA user fees—but it is notable that Martin addressed it.

“Should the unlikely reversal of the tariffs occur, we will not reduce our prices as this would only devalue our retailer’s inventory. It would delay any future price increase and could possibly allow us to do more in terms of discounts and free goods to support our retailer’s ability to drive sales of our brands.

Bottom line.

Tariffs are real and we pay them. But the numbers are far more manageable than the talk in the community suggests, we've shielded you from most of it, and the pieces that scared people the most (the 100% number, the January increase) don't apply to our ci**rs (for now) because of where and how they're made.

Skip

Sources

[1] U.S. Customs and Border Protection, CBP Form 7501 (Entry Summary) — the entry document that reports classification, country of origin, and duty owed. (RoMa Craft import records; correspondence with All American To***co, LLC, April 2025.)

[2] Supreme Court of the United States, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (decided Feb. 20, 2026); IEEPA tariffs terminated Feb. 24, 2026. See Congressional Research Service summary: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11398

[3] Cigar Rights of America, "Trump Administration Finalizes Section 301 Tariffs; Premium Cigar Imports Subject to New Duties" (July 24, 2026): https://cigarrights.org/trump-administration-finalizes-section-301-tariffs-premium-cigar-imports-subject-to-new-duties/

[4] halfwheel, "Section 301 Tariffs: Dominican Republic & Nicaragua Increasing to 12.5 Percent": https://halfwheel.com/section-301-tariffs-dominican-republic-nicaragua-increasing-to-12-5-percent/475290/

[5] Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, "USTR Section 301 Action on Nicaragua's Acts, Policies, and Practices Relating to Labor Rights, Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the Rule of Law" (Dec. 10, 2025): https://ustr.gov/about/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2025/december/ustr-section-301-action-nicaraguas-acts-policies-and-practices-relating-labor-rights-human-rights — Federal Register Notice of Action: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/12/2025-22690/notice-of-action-nicaraguas-acts-policies-and-practices-related-to-labor-rights-human-rights-and

[6] Cigar Coop, "Nicaraguan Ci**rs Won't Be Subject to 100 Percent Tariff" (Dec. 10, 2025): https://cigar-coop.com/2025/12/nicaraguan-ci**rs-wont-be-subject-to-100-percent-tariff-cigar-news.html

[7] halfwheel, "RoMa Craft's Foreign & Domestic Returning This Fall": https://halfwheel.com/roma-crafts-foreign-domestic-returning-this-fall/475732/ ; and "RoMa Craft Tobac Increasing Prices Next Week, Cites Tariffs": https://halfwheel.com/roma-craft-tobac-increasing-prices-next-week-cites-tariffs/451376/

[8] Cigar Association of America v. FDA — Judge Mehta ruling (April 15, 2026) reaffirming premium ci**rs are outside the FDA deeming rule, ending user-fee assessment. See Cigar Rights of America summary: https://cigarrights.org/mehta_dec/

Due to tariffs, RoMa Craft Tobac is increasing prices. Notably, the company said it would not lower prices if President Trump reverses his tariffs.

12/31/2025

RoMa Craft Tobac Pic of the Day via .joe

7 straight years of smoking at least one RoMa each day.

Impressive.