For the past several years, Charlie Minato has closed things out with 10 questions he thinks will face the cigar industry as a whole or will pertain to a specific company or individual and most likely have its resolution in the coming 12 months. Three years ago, we decided it was appropriate to not only look back upon those questions to see what we might have learned in the past year, but to grade them. This is a bit of a subjective process; there aren’t letter grades or a cumulative score; instead, it is a way to show where trends might not have come to fruition, where the evidence of the moment didn’t lead to the expected conclusion, or where something foretold a change or event in the future. As we close out 2015, here are the Ten Questions for 2015, graded.1. HOW WILL THE FDA DECIDE TO REGULATE PREMIUM CIGARS?Up until late last year, it wasn’t clear when the U.S. Food & Drug Administration would announce its plans to regulate the premium cigar industry; turns out the answer was April 24. While it’s important to point out that nearly everyone who claimed to be “in the know” seemed pretty far ...
↧