Fortuna is a Spanish brand of cigarettes, currently owned and manufactured by the Spanish company Altadis, a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco. Fortuna is Spanish for “fortune” or “luck”.
History
Fortuna was first introduced in 1974 in Spain by Tabacalera, a Spanish tobacco conglomerate that is now half of the Altadis corporation. When Fortuna was launched in 1974, the market was dominated by black tobacco and the few international brands of blonde (light) cigarettes that were very expensive for the Spanish smoker. As a response to this, Tabacalera launched Fortuna cigarettes which were a type of blonde tobacco with a filter. With Fortuna came the first American blonde-flavored cigarette and in its first six months almost 700 million cigarettes were sold. Ten years later, it spread internationally, first in France, and then in countries like Italy, Morocco, and the United States. For more than thirty years, Fortuna has been sold in Spain on the blonde cigarette market.[1] The tobacco mixture used in Fortuna cigarettes is of a Virginia type.
In April 2008, Altadis changed the pack design to a "new and modernized look" and reduced the number of its big pack cigarettes from 25 to 24, with the aim of setting a round price (which was €3,00 at the time).