Interview with Ramez Mazzawi 🇯🇴 Chairman and Partner of Romman Tobacco

1.  Hello Ramez, nice to meet you. Can you please tell us how long do you work in the hookah industry? When you started to smoke hookahs?

We have been in the hookah industry since 1999 and our business ventured into not only producing the shisha tobacco but also producing the Egyptian style hookahs under the Nammor brand.

2. How did you get into the tobacco business and start producing tobacco?

When we started the production our aim was to produce a shisha tobacco that one can enjoy for couple of ours since at that time the only available brands can be smoked for 40 minutes then they burn and the smoking session ends.

The aim was to make the smoking session long lasting (two hours +) and the taste must be as if one is eating the fruit it self.

3. You had a production license in Russia, what became of it? I haven’t seen Romman in stores in a long time, and I have at least 5 favorite flavors – Ivory Coast, Blackberry, Dark Grape, Watermelon with Strawberry and Cucumber Lemonade. Any chance I can buy them again in Russia?

Yes we had a production license in Russia with a Russian partner.

Our partner ran into a financial problem hence made him stop selling these items.

If we can qualify a good sole agent for the Russian Market then we can start selling again those beautiful tasty flavors along with much more flavors.

4. How many flavors do you have at the moment?

Our production and products now are divided into 3 main categorie:

1. Natural golden shisha tobacco

2. Red shisha tobacco

3. Black shisha tobacco

Among those 3 categories we have over 70 flavors and extra 39 for the mixes.

9. Can you tell me more about difference between golden, black and red categories and what are they made of? Our company also divide types of tobacco to categories – blond leaf, dark leaf and cigar leaf. Is it similar way? 

Natural golden tobacco is a Virginia brand that grow up in France and in Ukraine and other Europe countries and this brand have a low nicotine.

Red tobacco is a mix between medium nicotine and less nicotine and it is coming from Europe too and you add some red color as per our customer request.

Black tobacco is coming from American Latin and higher nicotine with strong smoke and strong flavor and black tobacco can be made in burley type  and cigar type but we prefer burley for many reasons as one of these reasons are it takes the raw material quickly and have a good taste with level of nicotine.

Burley contains little sugar, and has generally been cased (sweetened) with humectants, sugars, or other flavors for uses.

The nicotine level of Burley tobacco was found to be 0.650 %. While for Oriental tobacco leaves it was difficult to found reliable value of nicotine level, it was not possible to get well-integrated nicotine peak area by this method of analysis and set of conditions.

6. It’s very interesting, thank you.
What plans does your company have now? Are you planning to enter new markets?

Entering new markets is an on going aim and goal for us.

7. What do you think about the growing popularity of Russian brands?

I have not seen any in markets we are serving.

8. Does your factory only produce your tobacco, or do you also produce for other brands by contract?

We do manufacture under private label but our contracts with the owners doesn’t allow us to reveal their names.

9. Can you tell us about the hookah market and culture in Jordan?

Jordan’s relationship with hookah smoking has existed since the time of the Ottoman Turks, passing through Egypt. Therefore, no Jordanian house is free of hookah, as you will find every house in Jordan has a hookah, and it is used on occasions, holidays and trips.

The Jordanian market is rich in shisha products of all kinds and shapes, and Jordan is filled with many licensed cafes, knowing that the license to operate shisha in restaurants and cafes is high and expensive in fees, as it is not easy to circumvent the shisha trade license in Jordan

And as I said, hookahs are used in homes for special occasions

As for the molasses industry, there are many of these factories that are not licensed because of the license costs

Romman brand tobacco is considered the best in the world, and it is the third brand that entered America after Nakhleh and Al Fakher. It was a very fierce competition because of its high quality and reasonable prices, and we entered America in 2001.

Now… everything is fine.