RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Putra Mandiri is commited to be the leading cigarette factory in Indonesia, working its way to find newest products and innovations. Therefore, we realize the important roles of R & D department in our company.

Our R & D department is working tirelessly to find new flavours, blends and innovations for our cigarette products.

Indonesia has produced a special cigarette called Kretek. "Kretek" are cigarettes made with a blend of tobacco, cloves and other flavors. The word "kretek" itself is an onomatopoetic term for the crackling sound of burning cloves. Partly due to favorable taxation compared to "white" cigarettes, kreteks are by far the most widely smoked form of cigarettes in Indonesia, where about 90% of smokers usually smoke kreteks.

The origin of kretek cigarettes can be traced to the late 19th century. The creator of kretek was Haji Jamhari, a native of Kudus in Indonesia's Central Java region. Suffering from chest pains, Jamhari attempted to reduce the pain by rubbing clove oil on his chest. Jamhari sought a means of achieving a deeper relief and smoked his hand-rolled cigarettes after adding dried clove buds and rubber tree sap. According to the story, his asthma and chest pains vanished immediately. Word of Jamhari’s product spread rapidly among his neighbors, and the product soon became available in pharmacies as rokok cengkeh; clove cigarettes. First marketed as a medicinal product, kreteks became widely popular. In those years, the locals used to hand-roll kreteks to sell on order without any specific brand, packing, or limits on ingredients used in production. A resident of Kudus named Nitisemito had the idea of starting serial production and selling kreteks under a proprietary brand name. Unlike other manufacturers, Nitisemito, who first created the Bal Tiga brand in 1906, enjoyed great success by implementing unprecedented marketing techniques, such as using embossed packs or offering free-of-charge promotional materials. Commercial manufacture did not start in earnest until the 1930s.

During the period from 1960 until 1970, kreteks became a national symbol against "white cigarettes". In mid 1980’s, the number of machine-produced cigarettes exceeded that of hand-rolled ones. One of the largest income sources of Indonesia, the kretek industry comprises 500 large and small manufacturers employing a total of around 10 million people.