Maggie Campbell on making the US a rum nation
The CEO of American Cane, Maggie Campbell, shares her vision to redefine US rum and build a distillery in Louisiana.
Established in 2024, Louisiana-based American Cane aims to reclaim the nation’s forgotten rum heritage. At its helm is Campbell, whose industry experience includes a three-year stint at Rémy Cointreau’s Mount Gay distillery in Barbados and almost a decade at Privateer Rum, in Massachusetts, US, where she was head distiller.
Campbell stepped into the CEO role at American Cane last year, joining founder Chaz Vest to highlight the country’s history of rum and establish it as a rum-making nation.
“Our goal is to build a physical home for rum in the US,” Campbell tells me over Zoom. Rum was the most influential spirit in the US for 200 years, according to the company.
Until it opens its own site, the company has debuted with Banter, a sourced rum designed to be high quality, approachable and affordable.
The rum comes in two variants, White (40% ABV, US$24) and Amber (43% ABV, US$26).
Banter White Rum is a pot-and-column blend of molasses and cane juice from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, the Amber rum combines pot-and-column rums consisting of Jamaican, Trinidadian and Guatemalan and Dominican molasses and cane juice rums that are aged for up to four years.
Super-premium leads rum growth in US
Campbell believes that growth in the rum category is coming from the premium tier, which is “still a very small share of the rum market”. The vast majority of rum sales come from a “more accessible price point” she explains, in the US$10 to US$30 range.
She also questions whether long-established players are still resonating with drinkers: “A lot of the legacy brands are losing market share – is the message that they’ve had still the right fit for drinkers today?”
According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the US (Discus), rum volumes fell by 6.2% last year to 19.4 million nine-litre cases, dropping below 20m for the first time since 2003. Value declined by 6.6% to US$ 2.1 billion year on year. The only bright spot within the category was super-premium rum, which grew by 2.9% in volume and 3.9% in value in 2025.
Rum has now fallen out of the top-five biggest spirits categories in the US by volume, as segments such as ready-to-drink cocktails boom.
In the US on-premise, NIQ data showed sales of rum fell by volume and value in the year ending June 2025, but higher-end tiers are seeing strong growth.
Flavoured and spiced rums now account for more than 56% of US sales, Discus revealed.
Campbell believes drinkers are increasingly interested in premium expressions that are “flavourful and dry” – a direction that she has taken with Banter’s flavour profile.
It was important to make a style of rum that doesn’t copy Caribbean islands like Jamaica or Barbados, Campbell says. “The way the American rum industry got their start was by sourcing rum and blending them on US soil. We’re not trying to imitate another island style.”
Instead, Campbell is looking at the historical and ancestral drinking traditions around rum, and considering those flavours when it comes to creating rum.
Campbell also points out that the US consumes “20% of the world’s rum and produces less than 1%”, which she hopes to change. “How do we have more than 1%? I think that’s a big part of bringing value back to rum, getting people engaged and what I like about Banter is that it’s fun, inviting and warm – it’s not a kind of overly fancy, exclusionary spirit.”
When the company starts to make its own rum, Campbell says the business will look at how the climate and different ageing environment impacts certain flavours.
She hopes Banter stands out on shelf with its bright label and attracts people who are new to the rum category, including younger consumers. “Our label is inspired by the Motown record, so it’s very brightly coloured. It feels really at home with a US consumer. It’s a famous style of font that’s US-made. It’s not trying to sell an exotic faraway place and the bright colours is because the rum category is kind of known for dusty browns.”
Within the US, Banter can be found in markets such as New York, California and Massachusetts. The brand also ships to 40 states.
Celebrating diversity
“The US is not strongly established in rum – it used to be a global force in rum,” Campbell explains. “Americans were rum-drinking people, and we’d really love to get American thinking of themselves as rum drinkers again. And that speaks to all Americans. We’re a big diverse group of people, and there’s incredibly diverse flavours in rum. I think that speaks well to our community and I think the historical presence of US rum on the global rum stage is something we’d love to see again but it takes time.”
The brand also seeks to honour the “traditions and contributions of all the people who helped create rum” in the US, which is a diverse group, Campbell explains.
“Where I live in Lafayette, it’s very close to the US-Mexico border, there’s huge Tejano communities here, large Indigenous communities. Obviously a lot of Black-Americans, Caribbeans, Creole folks, Cajun folks, and white folks all coming together. When you go to a barbecue joint, you see everyone represented. And I think that contribution to rum is an important part of the historical story that’s too often left out, but also just the fact that this was our staple drink, and it took concerted efforts for the story of whiskey to become America’s drink.
“I think that we can be a country of many different heritage drinks. It’s telling that historical story, reminding us of that heritage connection, not romanticising the past but respecting and honouring the intelligence and the people who are the makers and creators of this product.”
Large-scale distillery plans
The company is aiming to build a distillery in Louisiana in 2027 with the hope of opening a year later. Within the state, there are only a handful of distilleries that predominately make rum, including Stoli Group-owned Bayou and Oxbow.
“It was the original vision [of the company] to do that right away,” Campbell says, of building a distillery during a time where many are struggling financially. “We really took a look around at the end of 2024, start of 2025 and we saw where things were, and the economy is not where it was.”
As such, the company decided to release Banter from sourced liquid because the timing wasn’t right to build a distillery.
The company is firmly set on Louisiana as the location for the distillery. “It’s beautiful cane country out here. There’s still a lot of small farmers and there’s still some Black-owned cane farms which is sadly too rare. I think that’s always an important part of our vision.”
Campbell says Lafayette is “surrounded by cane fields, which is nice coming from Barbados and working in sugarcane – I wasn’t ready to let go of that.”
Campbell hopes to use local molasses and local cane to eventually create fresh pressed cane rums.
She believes there is an opportunity for rum to take share from other categories, such as American whiskey.
“I remember early in my spirits career decades ago, a lot of these whiskeys were very affordable and the stock was pretty mature for what you were getting – it was a steal.”
However, since the whiskey boom, she says many aged products have become very expensive. “I think when you look at age statement to age statement, price to price, rum has been undervalued for too long and it means that it’s still very price accessible and comparatively especially quality to quality, and it offers such a diverse range of flavours.”
Ultimately, Campbell’s ambition is to build a scalable, globally recognised brand, like Mount Gay is for Barbados or Bounty is for Saint Lucia, but for the US.
The aim, she says, is to become “a strong established large-scale US rum producer that brings America back to the rum shelf”.
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