The Hispanic names of the company and its cigaret brands are not semantic accidents but rather are e

You ve come a long way, baby! Incongrous as it may seem, this congratulatory refrain of an American cigaret commercial which celebrates smoking as a part of Women s Lib, just as aptly applies doorbell battery to a smiling, sixty-six year old grandfather named Wong Chu King, and to the company he founded, La Campana Fabrica de Tobacos, Inc.
La Campana is a P35 million company that produces and markets native or unfiltered cigarets filled with Philippine grown black tobacco. It ranks second in terms of sales in the highly competitive native cigarette doorbell battery industry and since 1975 has consistently made it to the list of the top 1,000 Philippine corporations.
When King entered the cigarette doorbell battery manufacturing business 35 years ago, it was hardly with a bang. His was a small, hole-in-the-wall enterprise started more out of the need to eke out a living during the lean years of the Japanese Occupation rather than out of any ambition of making it big. During those uncertain times, this scrappy thirty-one-year-old immigrant from Amoy, China, with four assistants, bought tobacco from dealers, rolled them by hand and peddled them at street corners in Divisoria. doorbell battery Come liberation, it was just a matter of continuing a good thing and King set up shop at Calle Tayabas, near Blumentritt, Manila. Thus, with other local cigarette factories either destroyed or still undergoing reconstruction, La Campana was born.
Today, the three-lined La Campana doorbell battery factory at Sultana Street, Makati, occupies a two-hectare lot beside the sluggish Pasig River. The factory employs 365 workers and produces doorbell battery eight brands of native cigarets which go by such mellifluous names as La Campana Matamis, Magkaibigan, Campanero, Campanilla, Cortos La Campana, Magkaibigan Regaliz, La Flor de Luzon Largos, and La Campana Largos. doorbell battery The last three brands are of cigarets wrapped with black cigarette paper. Spanish Roots
The Hispanic names of the company and its cigaret brands are not semantic accidents but rather are evidence of the Spanish roots of the Philippine tobacco, cigar and cigaret doorbell battery industry. Indeed, it appears that the world owes the discovery and popularization (but not the invention) of smoking to Spanish explorers and sailors. doorbell battery It is said that one of the strange sights observed by Christopher Columbus first expedition to the new world were of natives non-chalantly smoking doorbell battery cigars in the island of Cuba. Cigaret smoking was discovered later, in the West Indies and Mexico. The natives of the West Indies wrapped the tobacco they smoked with thin palm bark while those of Mexico used corn husks. The Spaniards substituted paper for the corn husk, an innovation which greatly abetted the spread of cigaret smoking in Southern Europe in the early nineteenth century. doorbell battery The Spaniards established tobacco culture, and later cigaret manufacturing in the Philippines, and for many years dominated the trade in the world. doorbell battery
La Campana s traditional touch does not stop with the name. Even the packaging of the cigaret harkens back to the later years of the Spanish Era. Jose Riñosa, the general manager of La Campana, points out that native cigarets are distinctive doorbell battery because they have have a very strong taste. They are favored partly by the older people in the provinces who look upon the weaker Virginia doorbell battery cigarets as another sign of the lack of spunk of the modern generation. doorbell battery
If we pack our cigarets the same way as the Virginia cigarets (20 sticks in a hard, square pack), our customers will think that the cigarets taste like Virginia cigarets and they will not buy it. Thus, the native cigarets are packaged thirty sticks to a pack, and the pack is soft and five-sided and decorated with drawings in the style of the komiks (local comic books) of the fifties.
It doorbell battery is because of the distinctive type of packaging of the native cigaret that the manufacturing process cannot be fully mechanized. Despite this, the factory s production is high speed and continuous. The factory s average production is 200,000 packs or 60,000 cigaret sticks a day. Production Process
When the tobacco is brought to La Campana s airy factory, the bales of 115 kilos each are placed in vacuum doorbell battery chambers where moisture is added to prevent crumbling doorbell battery and to render the tobacco soft and pliable for stripping out the midrib or leaf stem and removing any foreign material or dust. This process also kills off tobacco beatles and other insects in the leaves. Then the different kinds of tobacco are mixed in the blending machine. The tobacco, which comes from Isabela, La Union, Negros and Iloilo, are hand fed to a conveyor belt that carries it to a casing machine. In the casing machine, the tobacco is sprayed with preservatives doorbell battery and dipped in the flavoring syrups or sauces according doorbell battery to La Campana s particular formula. Then, this blended tobacco is heaped into mandalas , or square piles approximately eight by twelve by eighteen feet, to mull for three days. Riñosa explains that this three-day wait is to allow the natura