West In­di­an To­bac­co (WIT­CO), has an­nounced the in­tro­duc­tion of new pack­ag­ing for all of its prod­ucts, based on fur­ther reg­u­la­tions by the Gov­ern­ment and to iden­ti­fy il­le­gal trade of prod­ucts. De­tails fol­low in this press re­lease from WIT­CO:

West In­di­an To­bac­co (WIT­CO), lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­er and sole re­gion­al dis­trib­u­tor of/for to­bac­co prod­ucts with­in CARI­COM, will be in­tro­duc­ing new pack­ag­ing for all of its prod­ucts, in keep­ing with the Min­istry of Health’s man­date. WIT­CO’s cur­rent brands in­clude Dun­hill, Lucky Strike/ Du Mau­ri­er, Lucky Strike/ Broad­way and Roth­mans.

While all pack­ag­ing cur­rent­ly con­tains writ­ten health warn­ings as re­quired by law, the Gov­ern­ment in 2021 ef­fect­ed fur­ther reg­u­la­tions via the To­bac­co Con­trol (Amend­ment) Reg­u­la­tions for Graph­ic or pic­to­r­i­al Health Warn­ings (GHW) to be in­clud­ed on all pack­ag­ing.

WIT­CO’s Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor Lau­rent Mef­fre con­firmed that there has been no change in the price, taste, or flavour of the prod­ucts. He fur­ther in­di­cat­ed that the Com­pa­ny was pleased to part­ner with the To­bac­co Con­trol Unit (TCU) to im­ple­ment these changes.

The new pack­ag­ing in the in­dus­try, Mr Mef­fre not­ed, will as­sist in the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of sus­pect­ed il­lic­it prod­uct in the trade.  “For far too long, the mar­ket has been used as a tran­ship­ment point for il­lic­it­ly trad­ed goods, chief among these, be­ing cig­a­rettes. We re­main con­fi­dent that the Gov­ern­ment has placed fo­cus and re­sources be­hind a num­ber of ini­tia­tives to sup­port the erad­i­ca­tion of il­lic­it trade.  The im­ple­men­ta­tion of GHW’s with­in our in­dus­try is an ex­am­ple of one such de­vel­op­ment.  Over the past year, the Il­lic­it Trade task force es­tab­lished by the Min­istry of Trade has yield­ed pos­i­tive re­sults and we look for­ward to fu­ture suc­cess­es.” 

The com­pa­ny cur­rent­ly em­ploys ap­prox­i­mate­ly 200 mem­bers of staff at its Champs Fleur lo­ca­tion, and re­cent­ly in­vest­ed TT$85 mil­lion to en­hance its plant and ma­chin­ery and in up­skilling its work­force.  WIT­CO con­tin­ues to en­sure that lo­cal and re­gion­al con­sumers are sup­plied with best-in-class prod­ucts.