Machine Made
Cigars made by machine, rather than by hand. There are machines that work with long filler tobacco, but most operate using short-filler tobacco. While some are made to work with real wrapper leaves, the vast majority of machine-made cigars are made with homogenized tobacco leaf wrappers or binders. Homogenized tobacco leaf (HTL) is a mixture of chopped scrap tobacco and a cellulose adhesive, which is extruded into a sheet that can be cut in any size. Machine-made cigars are also known as mass-market cigars, as they are produced in far greater quantities than handmade cigars and are traditionally sold in convenience stores rather than high-end cigar shops. Machine-made or mass-market cigars are sold in the billions of units annually, compared to hundreds of millions for premium, handmade cigars.