Bentoel Indonesia clove cigarettes 1931

As a young man growing up in Bojonegoro, East Java, Indonesia, Ong Hok Liong first entered the kretek business as an assistant in his father's tobacco trading company. Although he was quite good at buying and selling tobacco, he had an unfortunate tendency to gamble the profits away.

With the funding in place, Ong was able to rent a house on Jalan Pecinan Kecil, which functioned as warehouse, office and factory. In order to ensure that it did not meet the same fate as that of his other failed brands, he made a pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Gunung Kawi to pay his respects to the holy tomb of sixteenth-century ascetic named Mbah Djugo. Many Javanese make offerings and even spend the night at the tomb of Mbah Djugo in hope that it will bring them wealth and good fortune.

One night on Gunung Kawi, Ong had a dream in which he met a bentoel vendor (bentoel is the root of the cassava plant). The next morning, Ong asked one of the grave guardians what he thought the dream might mean. The latter replied the dream was a sign to use 'Bentoel'.

He introduced a novel system of distribution by employing salesman to go around by bicycle or on foot, selling Bentoel from door to door. In 1950, with a work force, Ong Hok Liong took over a cigarette factory in Blitar complete with six hundred workers. With this added capacity, Ong decided to mechanize part of the production process and bought machinese to grind cloves as well as to blend tobacco. Other innovative measures followed - in the mid-1960s, Bentoel introduced benches for their rollers to sit on while rolling their kretek.

In 1968, Bentoel again broke new ground when the company purchased the first fully-automated rolling machinese in the Indonesian kretek industry.

One of the consequences of Bentoel's success in the late 1970s was that it attracted the attention of investors, from both Indonesian and abroad, who were only too eager to provide financial assistance to one of corporate Indonesia's brightest prospects.


(Contents are taken from "Kretek Book" by Mark Hanusz)