PCA 2026: Foundation Cigar Co.
Just weeks before the start of the 2025 PCA Convention & Trade Show, a fire broke out in the packaging room at the main AJ Fernandez factory in Estelí, Nicaragua. While some companies, like Scandinavian Tobacco Group, made it clear during last year’s trade show that the fire would be impacting its new releases, reading back over my 2025 booth post for Foundation Cigar Co., there’s no mention of the fire or its impact.
It turns out that Foundation is the most prominent company I visited that exhibited no new products at PCA 2026, an issue directly caused by the fire.
Nicholas Melillo, Foundation’s founder, told me that a large number of the company’s finished cigars that were still in the factory were damaged or destroyed by the fire, which in turn caused shipping delays for various releases. Credit to Melillo and his team, all of the new items that were announced last year ended up shipping, just not all of the quantity that Foundation had planned.