With­in three years of be­ing cre­at­ed in a kitchen in Arnos Vale, To­ba­go, To­ba­go Gold Choco­late Rum Cream has pen­e­trat­ed 18 coun­tries and is earn­ing rev­enue in eu­ros.

Last Thurs­day, com­pa­ny re­spon­si­ble for the creamy rum bev­er­age, was named 2023 En­tre­pre­neur award at the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of Com­merce and In­dus­try Cham­pi­ons of Busi­ness Awards, at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA).

In an in­ter­view with Busi­ness Guardian on Mon­day, To­ba­go Gold Choco­late Rum Cream founder, Lars Söder­ström, said as of last month the brand had won 22 in­ter­na­tion­al awards and he was grate­ful to be recog­nised for the hard work that the com­pa­ny is do­ing to push the brand.

Söder­ström, who was born in Swe­den, moved to Trinidad in 2000.

He is a for­mer TSTT mar­ket­ing vice pres­i­dent, ex-CEO at the Caribbean Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion in Bar­ba­dos and past busi­ness de­vel­op­ment ad­vis­er at the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank.

Delv­ing more in­to the com­pa­ny’s op­er­a­tions, Söder­ström said it has 15 in­vestors from six coun­tries in­clud­ing T&T.

He high­light­ed that while the re­sponse to the liqueur has been ex­treme­ly pos­i­tive, es­pe­cial­ly in the Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, he needs more in­vestors to keep up with the con­tin­ued suc­cess of the brand.

“As the founder, I mort­gaged my house and in­vest­ed first. And then we got small­er and big­ger and big­ger in­vestors, but more in­vestors are need­ed as the com­pa­ny can­not go to the bank and take loans, as the banks are not will­ing to take such risks even though you have a spread­sheet to show how the es­tab­lish­ment is pro­gress­ing. So it’s dif­fi­cult for a start-up com­pa­ny to get fi­nan­cial sup­port.

“In Swe­den, where I grew up, the gov­ern­ment in­vests in start-up com­pa­nies, and they take the risk as they see en­tre­pre­neur­ship as a path­way to cre­at­ing jobs and grow­ing the econ­o­my.

“The Trinidad Gov­ern­ment should al­so look in­to this mod­el to pro­vide risk cap­i­tal, as it would be ben­e­fi­cial to the econ­o­my, es­pe­cial­ly as the coun­try is seek­ing to di­ver­si­fy from oil and gas,” he de­tailed.

The founder said that the bev­er­age is do­ing well in su­per­mar­kets, re­tail stores, and the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port du­ty-free shops.

How­ev­er, he said the chal­lenge now is get­ting in­to bars, and oth­er spaces both lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly as oth­er al­co­holic bev­er­ages are com­pet­ing for shelf space.

Söder­ström said the com­pa­ny is a lit­tle con­glom­er­ate with an in­vest­ment hold­ing com­pa­ny in Lon­don and an­oth­er called To­ba­go Gold Eu­rope, which man­u­fac­tures and dis­trib­utes the prod­uct from Hol­land. Al­so, he said the com­pa­ny set up in Trinidad and To­ba­go deals with in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket­ing, man­age­ment, and brand­ing.

“We earn the mon­ey in eu­ros, so every month the com­pa­ny brings in its for­eign ex­change in­to T&T, earned from the ex­ports. We have a bank ac­count in Hol­land where we bring in the mon­ey to pay our sup­pli­ers, staff, and mar­ket­ing ex­pens­es. Our com­pa­ny does not suf­fer from the for­eign ex­change is­sues that oth­er busi­ness­es are cur­rent­ly fac­ing.”

He ex­plained that the creamy rum ware­house is in Am­s­ter­dam, and it ships to var­i­ous coun­tries from there.

He de­scribed Hol­land as the best hub for man­u­fac­tur­ing and ship­ping liqueur in the world.

“All the in­gre­di­ents, in­clud­ing Trini­tario co­coa, which orig­i­nates in Trinidad, and is the strongest co­coa and most ex­pen­sive in the world, are avail­able in Eu­rope.”

The founder out­lined that the new mar­ket that the com­pa­ny will be pen­e­trat­ing from Jan­u­ary 2024 will be the Unit­ed States, which is a big step for a com­pa­ny that on­ly start­ed three years ago.

Some of the coun­tries that To­ba­go Gold Choco­late Rum Cream is cur­rent­ly in are Ar­me­nia, Bel­gium, Cana­da, Den­mark, France, Ger­many, Hong Kong, Ice­land, Latvia, Lux­em­burg, Hol­land, Por­tu­gal, Ro­ma­nia, Sin­ga­pore, Switzer­land, T&T, Unit­ed King­dom, Ukraine.

The in­ten­tion is to ex­port to re­gion­al coun­tries as well.

Asked whether the com­pa­ny can keep up with the in­creas­ing de­mand, Söder­ström quick­ly stat­ed that it has an ex­treme­ly scal­able re­li­able sup­pli­er, and the al­co­holic bev­er­age com­pa­ny can pro­duce 1,000 times more in a cou­ple of months than oth­er com­pa­nies.

The founder said for this year in Trinidad the com­pa­ny’s rev­enue is grow­ing about 100 per cent year on year and glob­al­ly it is grow­ing at about 60 per cent over­all year on year.

How it all be­gan

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian last year, Söder­ström said one af­ter­noon in 2019 at his To­ba­go home, he and his maid were prepar­ing co­coa tea to re­lax, when they de­cid­ed to ex­per­i­ment with rum.

“I didn’t want to do any­thing with­out the good part­ner from the Caribbean. So then I thought about this and I got the idea about the drink and I had dis­cus­sions with a for­mer CEO of An­gos­tu­ra,” he said.

“So I chal­lenged my maid, can you do this? And that was a Sat­ur­day af­ter­noon but it had been brew­ing for 15 years, grad­u­al­ly, bit by bit.”

Af­ter that ini­tial spur of the mo­ment ex­per­i­ment, he sought out a pro­fes­sion­al to re­fine the taste.

“Lars and his helper at his home de­cid­ed to cre­ate some­thing with the idea of co­coa tea in mind, but to take it one step fur­ther, by adding maybe a few more spices and adding rum to it to cre­ate some­thing that was a lit­tle more pleas­ant to drink rather than just co­coa tea, which is de­li­cious in it­self. And that was the in­spi­ra­tion for To­ba­go Gold,” Söder­ström’s busi­ness part­ner and Chief Prod­uct De­vel­op­ment Of­fi­cer, Ian Rooks, told the Busi­ness Guardian.

Rooks added he was tasked with solv­ing the com­pli­ca­tions caused by mix­ing milk, choco­late and al­co­hol.

He said, “They had tried a few times to do this. They called me be­cause of my knowl­edge as a chef, to see if I could help with the cur­dling that takes place when you try to put al­co­hol and the milk prod­uct to­geth­er and then you add a re­al­ly pure choco­late to it. You get a grit­ty feel­ing in your mouth, the al­co­hol and milk start to fight and cre­ative cur­dling and lump­ing.”

Rooks re­alised af­ter sev­er­al at­tempts that to re­fine the mix­ture that they would need even more as­sis­tance, es­pe­cial­ly if Söder­ström’s goal to put the drink on the mar­ket was to be re­alised.

“I re­alised af­ter a few tri­als and er­ror that if we want­ed this to be­come a prod­uct that went from ar­ti­sanal to in­dus­tri­al and there­fore be able to guar­an­tee a shelf life of a min­i­mum of two to three years, we need­ed to get pro­fes­sion­al help,” said Rooks, who then send their pro­to­type to a com­pa­ny in Hol­land.

De­spite send­ing the idea to a third par­ty, they made sure to re­tain the agency of the mix­ture, Rooks said.

Söder­ström, who is a cer­ti­fied choco­late mak­er, said the prod­uct was in­spired by the over 500-year tra­di­tion of co­coa tea in the Caribbean.

“I put my spin on the clas­sic recipe and cre­at­ed a choco­late rum cream liqueur flavoured with high-qual­i­ty co­coa, 100 per cent Caribbean rum, and Caribbean spice flavours,” he said in the in­ter­view this week.

To­ba­go Gold Choco­late Rum Cream cred­its its rapid growth and suc­cess to its com­mit­ment to us­ing on­ly the fresh­est, high­est-qual­i­ty in­gre­di­ents, its in­no­v­a­tive flavour pro­files, as well as the con­tri­bu­tion of its high­ly ac­com­plished part­ners, the man­age­ment team of ex­perts and the en­tire staff body who have lent them­selves to the de­vel­op­ment, evo­lu­tion and con­tin­ued suc­cess of the brand.

The pas­sion­ate founder said when To­ba­go Gold Choco­late Rum Cream was first launched in Ger­many at a trade show, peo­ple were say­ing it was the best prod­uct at the trade show.

“There were 200 com­pa­nies with hun­dreds of prod­ucts, and some in­dus­try ex­perts came up and said that the taste blew their minds. I was out in Los An­ge­les a month ago with a top bar­tender and his YouTube chan­nel for bar­tenders. And he said this is the best cream liqueur in the world. This drink could rev­o­lu­tionise how you con­sume cream.

“The com­pa­ny is still in its ear­ly stages, but we have the dis­tri­b­u­tion, the man­u­fac­tur­ing, the awards and the prod­ucts. All we need are in­vestors to help us con­tin­ue to grow brand aware­ness,” Söder­ström re­marked.

He added that the com­pa­ny’s ten-year goal is to be­come a glob­al leader in the choco­late cream liqueur mar­ket, po­si­tion To­ba­go Gold as the pre­mier rum liqueur brand in the Caribbean, and in­crease its pro­duc­tion to one mil­lion litres.