Tobacconist University

Its curriculum is cigar-heavy, but pipes, pipe tobacco, and smoking accessories are also within its scope. Its structure, now run entirely online, is the result of a long transformation that carried the institution from a shop's own internal training notes to its present form.

Founding and Development

The institution's founder is Jorge Armenteros. According to the account given, the core of the enterprise was the training material Armenteros prepared to train his own staff at the tobacco shop he ran in New Jersey; 1996, the year this material turned into an organized program, is taken as the founding year. According to the same account, the notes circulated for a time as printed handouts passed from hand to hand, and, driven by interest from customers, turned into open classes held in hotel ballrooms.

The cigar boom of the second half of the 1990s rapidly raised consumers' product knowledge, and the person behind the counter began to be expected to be better informed than the customer. In the early 2000s, the internet's spread of both accurate and inaccurate information pushed the institution toward becoming a publicly accessible reference source. Records indicate that the professional certification program went online in 2008 and was adopted as the training curriculum of the American retailer association (the organization known successively as RTDA, IPCPR, and PCA).