Fanning the coals
Clearing the stem.
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Clearing the stem.
Most of the leaf for shisha tobacco isn't grown in Egypt or Jordan — it's grown in Poland, at 15,000–17,000 tonnes a year, with Germany a distant second at around 5,000.
Moassel isn't made from just any tobacco leaf — it uses a specific variety of Virginia (Flue-Cured Virginia, FCV) with a particular chemistry: at least 25% sugar in the leaf (in practice usually well above that), nicotine under 1% — the industry-accepted range is 0.5–1.5%, more often 0.8–1.1% — and a distinctive pale lemon leaf color.
Growing conditions are equally narrow: temperatures of 20–30°C, 8–12 hours of moderate (not overly intense) sun a day, and light loamy soil with a pH of 6.0–7.0 — well-drained but still moderately moisture-retentive.
There's also an agronomic detail that sets shisha-grade apart from ordinary Virginia: the plants aren't topped. Topping shifts the leaf's chemistry toward higher nicotine and lower sugar — for moassel that's treated as a defect. For the same reason, shisha-grade is planted at twice the density of ordinary Virginia, which means twice the manual labor for transplanting seedlings.
According to trade publication Tobacco Asia (June 2025), the picture by volume doesn't match the popular assumption that all shisha tobacco comes from Egypt or Jordan:
The same top three is indirectly confirmed by processor Mella SRL (Italy, more than 22 years in the market) — Italy itself doesn't grow shisha tobacco, but it processes leaf and supplies it to the world market. The company names the same three countries — France, Poland, Germany — and puts the sugar range at 28–32% as the upper bound for shisha-grade leaf.
Zimbabwe has recently joined the list of producing countries: the first experimental plantings took place in 2022 (Cavendish Lloyd Group), and in 2023 the country was issued its first and so far only license to grow shisha tobacco. The harvest: 101.6 tonnes in 2023, 399.4 tonnes in 2024, with roughly 650 tonnes expected this season. The plantations sit in Mashonaland West and Mashonaland East provinces, above 1,300 meters of elevation; since Zimbabwe is landlocked, exports go through the ports of Beira in Mozambique and Durban in South Africa.
Turkish, or "oriental," tobacco is a separate story that often gets confused with shisha-grade leaf. It's a small-leaf, sun-cured variety historically grown in Thrace and Macedonia — territory that today spans Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia, and Turkey — and later along Turkey's Black Sea coast, in Egypt, and in South Africa. The name stuck because of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled these lands until the late 19th and early 20th century.
Oriental leaf has historically gone into cigarette and pipe blends — it's been part of Camel since 1913, for instance — not directly into moassel. It's a separate line of tobacco varieties from shisha-grade Virginia, and the fact that marketing sometimes conflates the two categories is a real source of confusion worth untangling deliberately: "Turkish tobacco" and "hookah leaf" aren't synonyms.
The product called moassel (muʽassel) itself is an early-20th-century invention, and its birthplace is Egypt. The idea was to ferment tobacco leaf with molasses, glycerin, and flavorings to produce a moist, pliable blend. Before that, hookahs were packed with lightly processed leaf that was harder to smoke, gave off a harsh smell, and delivered a high dose of nicotine.
The rise of sweet-flavored moassel — and the hookah's growing popularity with younger audiences that came with it — began in the early 1990s, when lightly sweetened tobacco became the dominant format. The article on the shift from tombak to moassel covers how the composition and format of the tobacco changed along the way in more detail.
The mechanics behind "brand country" and "production country" being different things are easiest to show through one example — Al Fakher.
The brand was founded in 1999, with its global office in Dubai (UAE). In 2006 it was bought by Al Eqbal Investments Co PLC, a company registered in Amman (Jordan) and traded on the Amman Stock Exchange under the ticker ASE:EICO. In other words, the parent structure behind a brand commonly called "from the UAE" is, in practice, Jordanian. The group's revenue for 2019 was 93.3 million Jordanian dinars.
Al Fakher's factories are located in Poland, Egypt, and the UAE — blending and packing happen, among other places, right where part of the raw material is grown. Legal registration in Jordan, headquarters in Dubai, production across three countries: to the consumer it's one brand, but behind it sit three different points in the chain.
In 2014 the EU adopted Directive 2014/40/EU (the Tobacco Products Directive), which banned "characterizing" flavors in cigarettes and roll-your-own tobacco — fully, as of May 20, 2020, after a transition period for flavors holding more than a 3% market share.
Waterpipe (hookah) tobacco, however, was explicitly excluded from that ban: the European Commission was meant to separately study youth hookah consumption, but the general flavor ban was never extended to it. That's exactly why Germany and Poland can legally remain producers of shisha tobacco for both export and the local market, without falling under the rules that hit flavored cigarettes.
One caveat is worth adding here: the 2014 directive laid the groundwork for a future revision of the rules, tied to a review of youth hookah consumption that started in 2021, but no confirmation could be found on whether requirements for hookah tobacco were actually tightened as a result of that review — the available material describes the scope of the TPD revision in general terms, not a final decision on the waterpipe exclusion.
The honest answer is: there's no data. Despite Russian brands being present on the market, not a single source with verifiable figures on leaf growing or local shisha tobacco production in Russia could be found — there are only general anti-tobacco regulations (Federal Law 15-FZ) that don't specifically address shisha tobacco. Stating figures here would be premature.
Hookah Hub's catalog holds origin data for 278 tobacco brands, and the process of collecting that data illustrates the same mechanics described above: we recorded a brand's country from the company's legal registration details, not from the market where the brand sells or is perceived to be from.
We got caught out by this ourselves. MYA Saray reads, at first glance, like a Spanish brand — but according to the paperwork, it's American. Shisha Kartel comes across as a standalone brand, when in fact it's a sub-brand of a UAE company. Neither case is a manufacturer's mistake — it's a routine consequence of how the industry is structured: registration, headquarters, factory, and target market can all sit in different countries at once, and none of them is the single "correct" answer to the question of where a given tobacco actually comes from.
Where is most of the leaf for shisha tobacco grown?
According to Tobacco Asia (2025), the largest producer is Poland, at 15,000–17,000 tonnes a year, followed by Germany (around 5,000 tonnes) and France (around 1,500 tonnes).
Does that mean Egypt and Jordan don't produce shisha tobacco?
No — both countries are part of the chain, but the source describes their leaf-growing volumes only as "smaller," without specific figures; it's there, and in the UAE, that finished product has historically been blended.
How is leaf for moassel different from ordinary tobacco leaf?
It's a Virginia variety with at least 25% sugar, nicotine in the 0.5–1.5% range, and a pale lemon leaf color; the plants aren't topped, so the leaf's chemistry doesn't shift toward higher nicotine.
Is shisha tobacco produced in Russia?
There's no verifiable data on this, despite Russian brands being sold on the market — the topic remains without confirmed statistics.
Why doesn't the country on a brand's label always match its production country?
Because a company's registration, headquarters, and factory are often in different countries — as shown by Al Fakher (registered in Jordan, offices in Dubai, factories in Poland, Egypt, and the UAE) and by cases in the Hookah Hub catalog, where a brand's country was taken from legal documents rather than from the market it sells in.
The subject of tobacco's origins continues in the article on how shisha tobacco changed from tombak to moassel; strength and its labeling are covered in the article on what determines shisha tobacco strength and what its markings mean. The practical side of storing finished tobacco — how to avoid over-drying or mold — has been covered separately as well.