CYNTHIANA, Ky. — This year's U.S. tobacco crop is the smallest since 1874. The big cigarette companies have cut thousands of workers amid slumping sales. Advertising restrictions are so tight, it's illegal to sell so much as a bumper sticker emblazoned with a cigarette brand name.
And smoking is so out of favor that even in Kentucky, the heart of tobacco row, politicians talk about hiking the cigarette tax and banning smoking in restaurants.
This would not seem to be a good time to launch a cigarette company.
But in a banged-up warehouse on the hem of this 200-year-old farm town, tobacco grower Bob Ammerman and his son, Mike, have made the leap. A dozen hulking machines pack their secret blend of dried leaf into rolled paper. The smell of tobacco, at once sweet and acrid, thickens the air. The assembly line chuffs and clanks around the clock.
Every day except Sunday, 12 million cigarettes roll down the conveyor belts to be packed in the red, gold and green boxes labeled Kentucky's Best. At a time when thousands of growers have sworn off tobacco to raise organic vegetables or freshwater shrimp, the Ammermans have invested $10 million in America's nicotine habit.
"To make a consumer product with this much notoriety, well, we looked at it pretty hard," said Mike Ammerman, 40.
"But we're here in central Kentucky. My father grows tobacco. My grandfather grew tobacco. His father grew tobacco. This is what we do. This is what we know."
In the 2 1/2 years the Ammermans have made cigarettes, their annual sales have shot from $2 million to $55 million. They expect sales to more than double next year.
This was, as it turned out, a very good time to launch a cigarette company.
Opportunities for independent cigarette makers have exploded in the five years since the Big Four -- R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard -- reached a legal settlement requiring them to pay states $246 billion over 25 years for the health-care costs associated with smoking.
To fund that obligation, the tobacco giants raised prices. The cost of Marlboros, for instance, almost doubled to $3.50 a pack or more in high-tax states. Smokers, who are disproportionately low-income, began to look for alternatives.
As Brian Jenkins, a 35-year-old auto mechanic, put it: "I either needed to quit or to find a cheaper brand."
