In 1997—at the height of a wave of exposés, lawsuits, and public outrage against the tobacco industry—Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, launched a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. The factory he opened near the Atlanta International Airport to churn them out at scale attracted ample media attention. But this coverage was more positive than one might have expected.
Torigian wasn’t actually involved in the dubious tobacco industry. Bravo cigarettes contained nothing but lettuce, dried and cured to look like tobacco, processed into sheets, shredded, flavored with herbal extracts, and rolled up and boxed like any other cig.
Torigian’s marketing materials claimed that Bravo “tastes (well pretty close) like a cigarette,” but lacked their harmful nicotine and tobacco tar. However, in interviews, he stressed that he hadn’t spent 40 years developing the product just to offer a safer replacement for traditional smokes. He wanted people to use Bravo as a smoking cessation tool. “You get the physical and psychological satisfactions you’ve associated with smoking, like opening the pack, lighting up, puffing,” Bravo’s old website explained. So when you decide to quit tobacco but face cravings, “you smoke a Bravo instead of an ordinary cigarette until the time comes when you don’t need either.”
“No matter how often you may have tried and failed,” the site promised, “Bravo will help you break the smoking habit entirely. It will do so safely, naturally and gradually at your own pace.”
Even at the time, this struck many folks as an odd proposition. But Bravo wasn’t just one aging inventor’s offbeat idea. It was the most developed of many attempts, stretching back over a century, to develop alternatives to tobacco cigarettes. And Torigian’s persistence in bringing the brand to market, its modest success, and its eventual obsolescence reflect a rapid evolution from the ‘50s onwards in our understanding of the risks of smoking and the best ways to kick the habit.
“Tobacco has always had its critics,” says Louis M. Kyriakoudes, director of the Albert Gore Research Center and an expert in the history of the tobacco industry and nicotine addiction research. Some early European users, writing around the turn of the 17th century, complained about its aroma, flavor, and effects on their breath. Others griped about price and availability. But a fair few worried about its impact on their health, too. “So, there’ve always been people looking for something else to smoke” that’d offer the same experience, says Kyriakoudes.
As early as the mid-19th century, American inventors filed patents for tobacco replacements made of cheap, often fragrant materials like “finely cut cornstalks” or “leaves of sunflower and rhubarb.” A few of these early “herbal cigarettes” actually caught on towards the end of that century, Kyriakoudes adds—but primarily as medicinal items, smoked in order to “to treat upper respiratory tract symptoms like congestion.” The main legacy of those soothing, tobacco-free offerings was the development of easy-on-the-throat mentholated tobacco cigarettes.
The search for an herbal blend that could replace tobacco really took off in the late 1940s, though—around the same time epidemiological research started to draw clear lines between tobacco and lung cancer. Initially, independent inventors like Jean U. Koree, who worked on everything from airplane parts to injectable drugs, led this safety-focused charge. (He patented a formula for turning wood pulp into pseudo-tobacco in 1948.) But after a series of damning studies piqued the public’s interest between 1953 and 1954, Big Tobacco got involved in alternatives research as well, Kyriakoudes explains, in order to develop ostensibly healthier cigarettes for the health-conscious. Simultaneously, they initiated their now-notorious campaigns to insist that tobacco cigs were safe and sowed doubt about public health research. “They saw this as a publicity problem, not a public health problem,” says Kyriakoudes. “They think they’ve got to come up with a safer product to assuage their customers’ concerns.”
Torigian entered this research race in 1959. Born in Constantinople in 1922, his family immigrated to America in 1929, eventually establishing a pharmaceutical laboratory in New York City. Torigian served as a pharmacist’s mate in the Navy during World War II, got a degree in pharmacology from Columbia University in 1949, and worked with a series of small pharma firms in NYC. He later claimed that one of his mentors, Joseph Genovese, who managed a local drugstore chain, challenged him to develop a safer cigarette. He saw a “refreshingly simple, direct, and efficacious” way to meet that challenge: swap out tobacco and its nicotine.
Like many early tobacco alternative researchers, Torigian initially planned to replace one habit with another. But according to his widow, Joanne Torigian, he became convinced that smoking any plant was potentially deadly, as it’d always produce some level of harmful tars and particulates. So he decided to design and market his tobacco alternative as a cessation tool.
Torigian passed away in late 2021, at 99. But Joanne had a front row seat to his work on Bravo. She even gave the brand its name. “I come from an Italian background,” she says. “So when he told me he was interested in doing this, I said, ‘Oh, Puzant, bravo, bravo!’ And he said, ‘That’s what I’ll call it!’” In his lifetime, Torigian helped launch a few biomedical startups and assisted in the development of new forms of useful drugs like injectable anticoagulants and pediatric analgesics. But those closest to him say that Bravo, and the underlying idea of weaning people off smoking with a less harmful cigarette, became his lifelong obsession.
In 1960, he filed a patent for a process to dry, cure, process, shred, and roll almost any leafy green into pseudo-tobacco. From the start, he had a hunch that lettuce would be especially close to tobacco in look and taste, without creating many harmful byproducts. But he experimented with over 200 plants to test that hunch. Carrot, peanut, and tomato tops; cabbage, grape, and watermelon leaves; hickory, maple, and rhododendron. He personally prepared and tried smoking them all. As Bravo’s site later summarized, “Most were awful and made him feel sick.”
By 1965, he’d circled back to lettuce. And while most researchers were still tinkering with ideas, he worked with a set of investors to open a factory in Hereford, Texas, hire around 200 workers, and start churning out 90,000 packs a month. Although a brash decision in hindsight, at the time he had reason to believe the venture would be a big success. There were virtually no smoking cessation tools on the market, and tobacco insiders seemed to believe there’d be real consumer demand for the right alternative smokeable. Torigian was so confident he’d found “the answer to the global smoking problem” that he appeared before a 1967 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the development of safer cigs to declare “with some pride that such a product has been achieved.” He presciently called on Congress not to put any faith in filters, the big safety solution of the era, lambasted the tobacco industry for willful inaction on health and safety solutions, and urged legislators to join him in an “all-out-attack” on nicotine and tobacco.
But by 1969, Bravo was defaulting on loan payments, and by 1972 the brand was in bankruptcy. Kyriakoudes suspects that Torigian struggled with marketing; he was going head-to-head with a massive industry, after all, and trying to sell a safer alternative to a product many people still saw as largely safe. Torigian himself later claimed that he’d simply struggled with logistics and hostile business partners.
But it’s likely the biggest problem was that Bravo’s lettuce faux-tobacco cigarettes simply smelled and tasted terrible. People who tried them said they were worse than “coffee grounds in a newspaper wrapper,” and akin to “smoking old socks.”
Several tobacco alternative researchers cited “pungent, acrid, and objectionable burning odors” and “undesirable taste” as major hurdles to their projects. They tried to find solutions through the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, experimenting with ever more leaves—banana, coconut palm, taro—and with additives like paprika, sassafras, and turmeric. But the tobacco industry seemingly pulled support for alternatives research around the mid-‘70s. By then, Kyriakoudes explains, they had a solid playbook for muddying the waters of public health research and stymieing regulations—as well as a firm internal understanding of nicotine’s addictiveness and how to use it to retain customers.
Kyriakoudes suspects that the handful of individual inventors who kept pushing towards tobacco alternatives did so out of a genuine belief in harm reduction and desire to help others kick their tobacco habits. That’s certainly what drove Torigian to keep tinkering with his lettuce leaves, even after he lost his life savings on Bravo’s initial outing. After Bravo, he moved to Malaysia to help establish and manage a drug manufacturing plant, then took over and expanded his family’s lab. He officially retired in 1984, but experimented with startups like an early online nutritional counseling service. All the while, in his free time, he was patenting new drying and curing racks, new enzymatic processing solutions, and other new approaches to make a Bravo 2.0 launch more successful.
His persistence may have been fueled in part by obsession. But it also reflected a reasonable belief that there was still a need for something like Bravo. Despite Big Tobacco’s best efforts, awareness of the dangers of smoking gradually grew with time—yet the first nicotine gum to help people quit smoking only got FDA approval in 1984. Over the next decade, medical consensus emerged that a mix of nicotine replacement and counseling or therapy were the best tools to help people quit smoking. But not everyone had access to these resources—and folks like Torigian thought there ought to be an alternative to (as he saw it) replacing one form of nicotine delivery with another.
Torigian also started his work in an era when even anti-tobacco crusaders viewed smoking as an oddly sticky social habit rather than an addiction. Despite mounting evidence that nicotine ought to be treated like other addictive drugs, health officials hesitated to endorse that view until the late ‘80s—in part because they feared labeling so many people as addicts in need of treatment. Torigian, like many other researchers, remained convinced that with the right support the mind could master any physical craving.
After all, Bravo helped him master his own cravings. According to Joanne, they were both smokers until Torigian started his work on Bravo. (He was a menthols man.) She quit cold turkey after he sent her to a hospital for a graphic look at a chronic smoker’s lung. But he needed something to help with his urges. The Bravo-fueled taper-down strategy he developed got him past the worst of them.
When Torigian relaunched Bravo into the booming but uncertain smoking cessation market of the late 1990s, he came prepared with a handful of scientific studies that supposedly showed lettuce cigarettes were safer than nicotine and could blunt cravings. He found doctors willing to endorse it as a cessation method, and included quitting strategy literature on his site and in bulk orders. He even came up with messaging to hedge against the taste factor. “As you know it takes a few packs to become accustomed to any new brand,” one Bravo ad reads. “Accept the different taste. Enjoy a more pleasant aroma,” reads another.
Wallace Pickworth, a prolific tobacco health effects researcher, explained over email that he and other scientists whose work Torigian referenced actually used Bravo cigarettes as a control in a few studies on the effects of nicotine. He still finds Bravo fascinating, but says their unpalatability limited their usefulness.
Dozens of pharmacies sold Bravos across the US until about 2010. So clearly, Torigian found a consumer base, and probably did help a few people. Both research and a small body of Bravo testimonials suggest a placebo can provide a little withdrawal relief, which can make the difference for some aspiring quitters. But time and research have shown that tools like Bravo don’t help a notable number of people on their quitting journeys, and may actually distract folks from more effective solutions. A small body of research also suggests that, while safer in some respects, lettuce releases certain heavy metals when smoked, and its tars carry unique risks. So Bravo (and most other herbals) were in the end arguably as dangerous as tobacco.
Bill Bradly/Courtesy of the Deaf Smith County Library
Joanne wasn’t privy to the internal workings of Bravo in its last days, but it seems as if the brand simply petered out as the American cessation market went down a different trajectory. You can still buy herbal cigarettes in U.S. today. But they’re mostly sold as cool or witchy affectations (think clove, lavender, and mugwort smokes), or as smokey movie props.
Still, Torigian remained convinced to the end that he was onto something big—that his lettuce cigarettes would be his legacy. And interest in the idea of an herbal cessation tool does persist in a few countries. Over the last decade, inventors in China, Korea, and Thailand have patented tobacco-free cigarettes, made of tea leaves, lotus, chicory, and more, to help people break free of tobacco. A 2024 study found that over 78 percent of the few dozen herbal cigs sold on global online marketplaces make (often unsupported) cessation aid claims.
So for better or worse, Torigian’s questionable yet well-intentioned dream of alternative cigarettes may yet be alive. Joanne is certainly still a true believer. “It would be wonderful if someone wanted to try this again,” she says of Bravo. “If someone wanted to do this to help people give up smoking.”
Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.
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