The United States Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) recently announced a cooperative agreement with the University of Kentucky to develop a cigarette tobacco reference product program. The University of Kentucky has provided reference cigarettes as the standard for non-clinical investigational purposes by tobacco manufacturers, contract and government laboratories, and academic institutions since 1968. The new project will produce and characterize 50 million, high-quality reference cigarettes representative of an American blended cigarette that are manufactured in one manufacturing run with certain physical and chemical characteristics to allow for proficiency testing, instrument calibration, method validation and for investigation purposes. Significant improvements will be made in the current Kentucky reference product program in terms of operational efficiency, establishing research capability and initiating the proficiency testing program. Information will be presented on the design of the new reference cigarette and the planned changes to the Kentucky reference cigarette program. The schedule for the proficiency testing program and the process used to certify the mean values of the reference cigarettes used in the proficiency testing scheme will be presented.