Founder and CEO of Ten to One Rum, Marc Far­rell, says glob­al de­vel­op­ments have re­sult­ed in the rise of a new gen­er­a­tion of con­sumers who val­ues prove­nance, au­then­tic­i­ty and trans­paren­cy as part of their pur­chase cri­te­ria.

This en­vi­ron­ment comes with new op­por­tu­ni­ties that lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers must not let pass them by, said Far­rell as he de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) Pres­i­dent’s Din­ner and Awards on Tues­day night.

Dur­ing his ad­dress, Far­rell spoke of be­ing steeped in grat­i­tude for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­turn to his home coun­try and share some of his own ex­pe­ri­ences, in the hope that it might serve as a small cat­a­lyst for oth­er lo­cal en­tre­pre­neurs.

He launched Ten to One Rum in 2019 in New York, and the brand has since be­come one of the most-award­ed rum brands in the world, gain­ing the at­ten­tion of Gram­my award-win­ning artist and en­tre­pre­neur Cia­ra as in­vestor and co-own­er in Oc­to­ber 2021, and grow­ing its ter­ri­to­ry to over 20 US mar­kets in a short times­pan.

“We must gal­va­nize our col­lec­tive ef­forts in the pur­suit of new ver­ti­cals that can pro­vide in­cre­men­tal av­enues of wealth for our na­tion, and we must mo­bilise these same ef­forts in search of new mar­ket fron­tiers, whether in the US, Latin Amer­i­ca, Eu­rope and be­yond,” said Far­rell, in his ad­dress to the au­di­ence of main­ly lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers.

“From steel­pan to co­coa to Car­ni­val, we have to chal­lenge our­selves to turn our own nascent do­mes­tic su­per­pow­ers in­to down­stream in­dus­try, with tan­gi­ble goods and ser­vices made avail­able both here and abroad. For a long time we’ve thought of our­selves as ‘re­source rich’ but seem­ing­ly on­ly in the con­text of oil and gas. It’s now time to chal­lenge and ex­pand that de­f­i­n­i­tion to in­clude the many oth­er as­pects of our re­source­ful­ness, our ap­ti­tude, and our cul­ture that will en­able us to chase and to cre­ate new op­por­tu­ni­ties for our­selves in the fu­ture.”

Far­rell shared that 20 years of liv­ing out­side T&T has taught him that Trin­bag­o­ni­ans are an ex­cep­tion­al peo­ple, ready to rise to this chal­lenge. He urged en­tre­pre­neurs and lo­cal busi­ness­es to seek to en­ter un­tapped glob­al mar­kets for greater pros­per­i­ty, con­fi­dent in the knowl­edge that our small coun­try has al­ready seen an out­sized and sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on the glob­al stage.

The cur­rent port­fo­lio of Ten to One Rum blends rums from all over the Caribbean, in­clud­ing Ja­maica, Trinidad & To­ba­go, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and Bar­ba­dos, and cur­rent­ly in­cludes sev­er­al ex­pres­sions.