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Held just weeks before the momentous August 8 deeming regulation deadline, the 84th annual
IPCPR show was a forum for information
sharing and new product debuts.
By Jennifer Gelfand
Highlights From
ICPCR 2016
L
ike many newly regulated tobac-
co product categories, the cigar
industry has been buzzing with
activity in the months since FDA’s May
10 release of the final deeming regula-
tions. Not surprisingly, July’s Interna-
tional Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers
Association show became the place to be
as retailers, manufacturers and virtually
anyone having anything to do with cigars
sought to get out in front of the regula-
tory wave coming their way.
Manufacturers in particular were
scrambling to get products already in
the pipeline onto the market by August
8, 2016, the deadline by which a product
had to be out before being subject to pre-
market approval in order to be placed on
store shelves at all. But retailers were
equally overwhelmed as they tried to
make sense of a murky ruling that sug-
gested many of them would possibly be
considered manufacturers under the new
regulatory scheme, and to understand
what would and would not be allowed in
terms of sampling and displaying prod-
ucts. By the time July’s show opened,
virtually everyone in the industry was
desperate for information—information
that doesn’t really exist yet, cautioned
Barry Schaevitz of Fox Rothschild.
“We are at the very, very beginning
of a very long process,” he told an audi-
ence of IPCPR attendees and exhibitors
who turned out in droves for industry
sessions held the day prior to the trade
show floor opening. “There is at least as
much that we don’t know about how this
will work as that we do know…we need
to have patience. I know it’s hard, but a
lot will change.”
One of the biggest potential changes—
a changing of the predicate date—is one
that the industry would welcome. Cur-
rently, the predicate date is February 15,
2007, which means any product on the
market by that date will not be required
to go through FDA’s pre-market approval
process at all as long as no changes are
made to the product. Any product that
went on the market after that date but
EVENT HIGHLIGHT
72
TOBACCO BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016