How Often Venues Reorder Cigars: 90 Days Median, 159 Days Average

I pulled the reorder data to answer a question a hotel F&B director asked me in July: how often does a place like mine actually buy the same cigar again? The answer out of 9,130 repeat purchases in our invoice corpus is a median gap of 90 days and an average of 159 days. Below is what those two numbers mean, why they disagree, and the one breakout I promised and cannot honestly deliver yet.

How often do venues reorder the same cigar?

Across 9,130 repeat purchases of the same cigar by the same venue, the median gap between orders is 90 days and the average gap is 159 days. Half of all repeat buys land inside a single quarter. The MDC invoice corpus behind those figures covers 24,363 line items linked to products, running from April 19, 2016 through September 24, 2026.

Ninety days is a clean number to plan against. A venue that carries a cigar and sells through a box roughly once a quarter is running a normal, healthy line. Anything much longer and the cigar is sitting, not selling, and the humidor space would earn more with a different SKU in the slot.

Why is the average reorder gap 159 days when the median is 90?

The average of 159 days runs 69 days longer than the 90 day median because a long tail of slow SKUs drags the mean upward. A cigar bought in March and again 14 months later counts the same as a cigar bought every 60 days. Use the 90 day median for planning. Use the gap between the two numbers as a warning about dead inventory.

Seasonality is part of the tail. Cigar volume in the United States is not flat across a calendar year, and the Cigar Association of America publishes the industry-level shipment context that sits behind that pattern. For general retail seasonality against which to benchmark your own months, the US Census Bureau Monthly Retail Trade survey is the primary source, updated monthly and free.

Can you break reorder frequency out by venue type?

No, not honestly. Venue type is populated for 60 of 1,703 customer records in the MDC system, about 3.5 percent. A bar-versus-hotel-versus-golf-club breakout built on 60 records would be noise dressed up as a finding. Every figure in this post is corpus-wide. When the venue type field is normalized across the full customer base, the segmented version of this study gets published.

I would rather say that plainly than ship a chart that sends someone’s purchasing plan sideways.

How many cigars does a venue need on hand to cover 90 days?

At the 90 day median reorder gap, a venue selling 5 cigars a day needs about 450 cigars in stock, which is roughly 23 boxes of 20, to get from one order to the next without a gap. The table below runs the same math across four common burn rates.

Cigars sold per day	Cigars needed per 90 days	Boxes of 20	Packs of 10
2	180	9	18
5	450	23	45
10	900	45	90
20	1,800	90	180

Those counts are total sticks, not sticks of one cigar. A venue moving 10 a day is typically spreading 900 quarterly sticks across 15 to 30 SKUs, which puts most individual lines at one or two boxes per quarter. That distribution is exactly what produces a 90 day median at the SKU level.

Does box size change how often you reorder?

Yes, directly. The most common box size in the MDC catalog is 20 cigars, accounting for 38.2 percent of all cigar SKUs, while packs of 10 or fewer make up 17 percent of cigar SKUs. A venue buying 10-count packs on a line that sells 20 sticks a quarter reorders twice as often as a venue buying the same cigar in 20-count boxes.

Smaller packs are not a mistake. Smaller packs are the right call on a new cigar you are testing, on anything above roughly $12 a stick at the counter, and on seasonal or limited-run product where a full box is a bet you have not earned yet. The Casa Magna D. Magnus II Optimus Unit (10) at $92.00 is a good example of a 10-count that lets a bar find out whether guests want the cigar before committing to a full box.

Once a line proves out, step up to 20-count and cut your order frequency in half. The Fratello Oro Robusto Unit (20) at $194.00 and the H Upmann By AJ Fernandez Toro Unit (20) at $198.00 are typical of the 20-count tier that most venues settle into.

Does cigar price change how often a venue reorders?

Price levels in the MDC catalog run from $2.00 to $1879.00 per unit, and the reorder study was not segmented by price tier, so I will not claim a correlation that I did not measure. What the invoice line items do show is straightforward: high-ticket showcase cigars appear as single-unit lines on invoices with long gaps, while the $6 to $10 counter cigars carry the repeat volume.

Plan the showcase shelf separately from the working shelf. A venue might reorder a display-grade cigar once a year and reorder the everyday robusto four times in the same period.

What does a 90 day reorder cycle mean for humidor capacity?

Size the humidor for peak, not average. Across 3,766 cigars with recorded measurements, the average cigar in the MDC catalog runs 5.78 inches long with a 51.6 ring gauge, so a 20-count box of average cigars occupies roughly a 9 by 8 by 2 inch footprint. A venue needing 450 sticks on hand should plan storage for about 550 to allow for delivery overlap.

Humidity control matters more as the quarter runs on. Cigars sitting 60 to 90 days in a poorly regulated cabinet will show it in the burn. Our humidor setup guide covers sizing and stabilization, and the FDA’s cigar product page is the primary reference for how premium cigars are classified and regulated at the federal level.

How do you set a reorder schedule you will actually follow?

Set a 45 day inventory count and a 90 day order date on the calendar, and set both as recurring. The 45 day count catches fast movers before a stockout. The 90 day order matches the median gap observed across 9,130 repeat purchases. Two recurring calendar entries beat any inventory system nobody opens.

Write your par level per SKU on a card taped inside the humidor door. When a count falls below par at the 45 day check, that cigar goes on the next order regardless of the calendar. Everything else waits for day 90.

For venues building a first list, the wholesale cigar buyers guide walks through SKU count and format mix. Bars, hotels, and clubs should start with the hospitality page, and shops with the retail page.

Sources and method: figures drawn from the MDC invoice corpus of 24,363 line items linked to products, April 19, 2016 through September 24, 2026, covering 4,890 active cigar SKUs, 9,130 repeat purchases of the same cigar by the same venue, and 3,766 cigars with recorded dimensions. Venue type is recorded for 60 of 1,703 customer records, so no venue-type segmentation is published here. Data current as of September 25, 2026.

When you are ready to build the quarter’s order, the full catalog is at /shop.

Written by Peter Roth. Last reviewed 2026-09-25.