China: Tea-Flavored Cigarettes Take Off

By TobaccoChina Online

As the Chinese market evolves, two trends have become very clear: one is the upgrading of consumption, and the other is the rationalization of high-end consumption. At present, traditional cigarette brands and homogenized styles fail to meet the needs of today’s consumers. Therefore, Chinese cigarette brands in the past two years have developed new styles.

Cigarettes, alcohol, and tea are a must-have for each household as they represent traditional Chinese hospitality. Based on this, China Tobacco Guizhou Industrial Co., Ltd. integrated alcohol into cigarettes in 2008, a move achieving great success in the market. In the past two years, China Tobacco Shandong Industrial Co., Ltd. (CT Shandong) actively integrated tea into cigarettes for its Taishan brand. The tea-flavored category won the initial praise of the market. With the maturity and popularization of flavored capsules technology, tea-flavored capsules have become a big hit in the market, which on the one hand has further increased the number of cigarette categories, and on the other hand, also realized the integration of tobacco and tea.

Tobacco corporations are increasing their efforts in producing products in these two categories. Among them, the following brands outperform others in the market: Taishan (Confucianism) from CT Shandong, Longfeng Chengxiang (Treasure) from China Tobacco Chongqing, Jiao Zi (Tea Rhyme) from China Tobacco Sichuan, and Seven Wolves (Golden Brick Age) from China Tobacco Fujian. Of these brands, Taishan Confucianism is the market leader in terms of overall reputation and evaluation.

On May 31, 2018, CT Shandong launched its Taishan (Jasmine Flavor) series at the New Cigarette Tasting Symposium. The product is popular with smokers as they fell that it respects the traditional consumption habit that the Chinese smokers love tea.

In fact, as early as 2008, CT Shandong proposed the concept of “bringing tea into cigarettes”, pioneering the tea-flavored category. Supercritical extraction technology, tea extraction, tea polyphenols, and other industrial-grade innovative processes are adopted to achieve a light tea fragrance when smoking. The tea-flavored style produces a three-layered experience: first it tastes slightly sweet, then comes the rich tobacco flavor, and, finally, tea molecules and the flavor remains in the mouth.

Today’s consumers are more concerned about quality and cost-effectiveness, and they are willing to pay more for high-quality goods and services. Taishan strives to reduce harmful components in its smoke and effectively decreases the amount of cigarette tar by continuously implementing technological innovation. It not only ensures the taste of the smoke but also improves its health safety. For example, tea polyphenols have strong antioxidant activity, which can remove free radicals from the smoke. CT Shandong adds the extracted tea polyphenols to the filters and carries out a series of application evaluation tests on the optimum dosage and application effect in cigarettes. It turns out that the cigarettes with tea polyphenols added in the filters are greatly improved in terms of taste, and smoke irritancy is reduced, making the overall quality of the smoking experience significantly better than that of filters without adding tea polyphenols.

They also studied the reduction of nitrosamines and free radicals in the smoke of cigarettes with tea-flavored filters, which not only significantly increase the main aroma components in cigarettes, but also reduce over 30% of free radicals, nitrosamines, phenolic substances, and other harmful components in the smoke.

According to the Taishan brand’s plan, 2008-2014 represents the 1.0 era of tea-flavored cigarettes and 2015 to the present the 2.0 era. Under such a path, Taishan’s team-flavored cigarettes enriched the Chinese cigarette offerings while providing consumers with high-end, personalized, and differentiated new products.

It is worth noting that Jasmine Flavor, uses a flavored capsule, which has been rapidly developed in China in the past two years, creating such varieties as coffee, wine, floral, dried tangerine peel, ginseng, ginger juice, and menthol. According to statistics, there are currently as many as 80 styles of flavored capsules in China. Most of the tobacco companies participate in the r&d of these capsules. The reason why we pay so much attention to tea-flavored cigarettes because of the intimate relationship between cigarettes and tea as well as the importance of tea in the minds of Chinese people. It can be said that other flavored capsules are only supplemental and an adjustment of traditional cigarette cigarettes, but tea-flavored cigarettes are a main product for smokers.