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Founded in 2014 by three South Americans, including Venezuelan
CEO Antonio López de Haro, the boutique distillery exports rum
to France and Singapore, and aims to enter markets in Malaysia,
Japan, Hong Kong and Spain by next year.
"We are looking at a few pallets, we are talking maybe around
2,000 bottles per country, per year," López de Haro told Reuters
in an interview.
Currently, the company of 16 employees produces 500 bottles of
rum a month, each bottled by hand. Two of its brands, Samai's
Gold Rum and Kampot Pepper Rum were awarded gold medals at the
Madrid International Rum Conference in 2017.
According to a 2017 report by Orbis Research, premium brands are
driving demand growth in the rum market, but rum's top three
markets – India, the United States and the Philippines – are all
likely to record falls in sales during the period 2016 to 2021
due to high competition from non-alcoholic beverages.
López de Haro started the distillery, which is located in a
small alley in the capital Phnom Penh, with his high-school
friend Daniel Pacheco, and another partner, Diego Wilkins, from
Uruguay, after discovering that no one was producing rum in
Cambodia despite an abundance locally of sugarcane, a key
ingredient.
"The molasses that we found are really high quality but we were
quite surprised that there was no Cambodian rum," he said.
López de Haro said demand for rum is growing in Cambodia, where
people have traditionally favored beer, whisky and local rice
wine.
However, Rémy Choisy, a French national who runs a rum bar in
Phnom Penh, said more advertising was needed to make more
Cambodians aware of the drink.
"In Cambodia, people only drink sugarcane juice," Choisy said.
"They don't know so much about rum."
(Editing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Karishma Singh and Neil Fullick)
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