Abstract: In order to maintain the consistency of cigarette blending for regular cigarette maintenance, it is necessary to supplement or substitute single-grade tobacco strips in the blend from time to time. Therefore, a cigarette blend maintenance strategy based on mutual information was proposed. The co-occurrence frequency of single-grade tobacco strips in a cigarette blend and the mutual information between single-grade tobacco strips in pairs were calculated after analyzing the blending data. The mutual information allowed the compatibility between the single-grade tobacco strips to be assessed for blend maintenance. The results showed that: 1) This blend maintenance strategy could successfully restore a target blending in the actual production process. 2) This approach effectively took compatibility as a consideration factor to ensure that the new blend had good compatibility in the blend maintenance process with the rank average of missing single-grade strips of 6.585. 3) The proposed measurement index and the associated effect algorithm solved the challenge of effect measurement during single-grade tobacco replacement with unequal quantity. It could also measure the batch-to-batch single-grade tobacco replacement with unequal quantity in actual production process.