The CEO of American Cane, Maggie Campbell, shares her imaginative and prescient to redefine US rum and construct a distillery in Louisiana.
Established in 2024, Louisiana-based American Cane goals to reclaim the nation’s forgotten rum heritage. At its helm is Campbell, whose trade expertise features a three-year stint at Rémy Cointreau’s Mount Homosexual distillery in Barbados and virtually a decade at Privateer Rum, in Massachusetts, US, the place she was head distiller.
Campbell stepped into the CEO function at American Cane final 12 months, becoming a member of founder Chaz Vest to focus on the nation’s historical past of rum and set up it as a rum-making nation.
“Our purpose is to construct a bodily house for rum within the US,” Campbell tells me over Zoom. Rum was probably the most influential spirit within the US for 200 years, based on the corporate.
Till it opens its personal website, the corporate has debuted with Banter, a sourced rum designed to be top quality, approachable and inexpensive.
The rum is available in two variants, White (40% ABV, US$24) and Amber (43% ABV, US$26).
Banter White Rum is a pot-and-column mix of molasses and cane juice from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. In the meantime, the Amber rum combines pot-and-column rums consisting of Jamaican, Trinidadian and Guatemalan and Dominican molasses and cane juice rums which can be aged for as much as 4 years.
Tremendous-premium leads rum development in US
Campbell believes that development within the rum class is coming from the premium tier, which is “nonetheless a really small share of the rum market”. The overwhelming majority of rum gross sales come from a “extra accessible value level” she explains, within the US$10 to US$30 vary.
She additionally questions whether or not long-established gamers are nonetheless resonating with drinkers: “Loads of the legacy manufacturers are shedding market share – is the message that they’ve had nonetheless the proper match for drinkers right now?”
In accordance with the Distilled Spirits Council of the US (Discus), rum volumes fell by 6.2% final 12 months to 19.4 million nine-litre circumstances, dropping under 20m for the primary time since 2003. Worth declined by 6.6% to US$ 2.1 billion 12 months on 12 months. The one vivid spot inside the class was super-premium rum, which grew by 2.9% in quantity and three.9% in worth in 2025.
Rum has now fallen out of the top-five greatest spirits classes within the US by quantity, as segments equivalent to ready-to-drink cocktails growth.
Within the US on-premise, NIQ information confirmed gross sales of rum fell by quantity and worth within the 12 months ending June 2025, however higher-end tiers are seeing sturdy development.
Flavoured and spiced rums now account for greater than 56% of US gross sales, Discus revealed.
Campbell believes drinkers are more and more taken with premium expressions which can be “flavourful and dry” – a route that she has taken with Banter’s flavour profile.
It was vital to make a method of rum that doesn’t copy Caribbean islands like Jamaica or Barbados, Campbell says. “The way in which the American rum trade obtained their begin was by sourcing rum and mixing them on US soil. We’re not attempting to mimic one other island type.”
As a substitute, Campbell is wanting on the historic and ancestral consuming traditions round rum, and contemplating these flavours on the subject of creating rum.
Campbell additionally factors out that the US consumes “20% of the world’s rum and produces lower than 1%”, which she hopes to alter. “How do we’ve greater than 1%? I feel that’s a giant a part of bringing worth again to rum, getting folks engaged and what I like about Banter is that it’s enjoyable, inviting and heat – it’s not a form of overly fancy, exclusionary spirit.”
When the corporate begins to make its personal rum, Campbell says the enterprise will take a look at how the local weather and completely different ageing atmosphere impacts sure flavours.
She hopes Banter stands out on shelf with its vivid label and attracts people who find themselves new to the rum class, together with youthful customers. “Our label is impressed by the Motown file, so it’s very brightly colored. It feels actually at house with a US client. It’s a well-known type of font that’s US-made. It’s not attempting to promote an unique faraway place and the brilliant colors is as a result of the rum class is form of identified for dusty browns.”
Inside the US, Banter could be present in markets equivalent to New York, California and Massachusetts. The model additionally ships to 40 states.
Celebrating range
“The US just isn’t strongly established in rum – it was once a worldwide drive in rum,” Campbell explains. “Individuals had been rum-drinking folks, and we’d actually like to get American considering of themselves as rum drinkers once more. And that speaks to all Individuals. We’re a giant various group of individuals, and there’s extremely various flavours in rum. I feel that speaks nicely to our neighborhood and I feel the historic presence of US rum on the worldwide rum stage is one thing we’d like to see once more but it surely takes time.”
The model additionally seeks to honour the “traditions and contributions of all of the individuals who helped create rum” within the US, which is a various group, Campbell explains.
“The place I stay in Lafayette, it’s very near the US-Mexico border, there’s enormous Tejano communities right here, massive Indigenous communities. Clearly loads of Black-Individuals, Caribbeans, Creole of us, Cajun of us, and white of us all coming collectively. Whenever you go to a barbecue joint, you see everybody represented. And I feel that contribution to rum is a crucial a part of the historic story that’s too usually neglected, but additionally simply the truth that this was our staple drink, and it took concerted efforts for the story of whiskey to turn into America’s drink.
“I feel that we is usually a nation of many alternative heritage drinks. It’s telling that historic story, reminding us of that heritage connection, not romanticising the previous however respecting and honouring the intelligence and the people who find themselves the makers and creators of this product.”
Giant-scale distillery plans
The corporate is aiming to construct a distillery in Louisiana in 2027 with the hope of opening a 12 months later. Inside the state, there are solely a handful of distilleries that predominately make rum, together with Stoli Group-owned Bayou and Oxbow.
“It was the unique imaginative and prescient [of the company] to try this straight away,” Campbell says, of constructing a distillery throughout a time the place many are struggling financially. “We actually took a go searching on the finish of 2024, begin of 2025 and we noticed the place issues had been, and the economic system just isn’t the place it was.”
As such, the corporate determined to launch Banter from sourced liquid as a result of the timing wasn’t proper to construct a distillery.
The corporate is firmly set on Louisiana as the situation for the distillery. “It’s lovely cane nation out right here. There’s nonetheless loads of small farmers and there’s nonetheless some Black-owned cane farms which is unfortunately too uncommon. I feel that’s at all times an vital a part of our imaginative and prescient.”
Campbell says Lafayette is “surrounded by cane fields, which is good coming from Barbados and dealing in sugarcane – I wasn’t able to let go of that.”
Campbell hopes to make use of native molasses and native cane to ultimately create contemporary pressed cane rums.
She believes there is a chance for rum to take share from different classes, equivalent to American whiskey.
“I bear in mind early in my spirits profession many years in the past, loads of these whiskeys had been very inexpensive and the inventory was fairly mature for what you had been getting – it was a steal.”
Nevertheless, because the whiskey growth, she says many aged merchandise have turn into very costly. “I feel while you take a look at age assertion to age assertion, value to cost, rum has been undervalued for too lengthy and it signifies that it’s nonetheless very value accessible and relatively particularly high quality to high quality, and it presents such a various vary of flavours.”
Finally, Campbell’s ambition is to construct a scalable, globally recognised model, like Mount Homosexual is for Barbados or Bounty is for Saint Lucia, however for the US.
The purpose, she says, is to turn into “a robust established large-scale US rum producer that brings America again to the rum shelf”.
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