Judging by the number of people at the recent breakfast meeting of the Tamiami Airport Business Association, there was high expectation that free samples of Tortuga Rum Cake would be available.
This was a reasonable (and accurate) assumption, since the program was "Rum Cakes -- A Recipe for Success" and the speaker was Monique Hamaty-Simmonds, managing director of Tortuga Rum Cake Company.
More and more people kept arriving and the Calusa Country Club staff kept bringing more chairs to crowd around the tables.
While there were plenty of rum cake samples, Jorge Pe�a of AFLAC, membership director of the organization, lamented that he had hoped to take home several, but with the big crowd there was barely enough to go around.
Tortuga Rum Cakes Company is a local business success story.
In a relatively short time, the product has developed a strong international niche. Hamaty-Simmonds began selling the rum cakes -- produced by her family in Grand Cayman -- from her home in Kendall while still a student at FIU.
She got serious about the business after graduating in 1997, opening Tortuga Rum Cake Company and, with husband Marcus Simmonds, began looking for wholesale opportunities. Today, just seven years later, the couple imports 250,000 rum cakes a year into the United States.
Hamaty-Simmonds came to live in Kendall with her mother after her parents divorced. She attended Killian High and spent summers with her father and stepmother in Grand Cayman.
Her father, a pilot for Cayman Airways, watched all the tourists fly home with bottles of rum, and got to wondering what it would take to produce a rum that could be marketed as a Cayman Islands product.
He visited rum producers in Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana and in 1984 he began producing the new blend, Tortuga Rum.
Three years later Monique's stepmother began using the rum in a family cake recipe, first selling it as a dessert item in a local restaurant. Soon the family had more cake orders than they could fill, so they opened what would be the first of four bakeries.
It didn't take long after entering the import business full-time that Monique and Marcus found "with holiday orders, even with using the whole house and garage and all my friends helping, we couldn't keep up with demand."
They tentatively moved to a 1,000-square-foot warehouse, afraid it would be too big. Now they have a 25,000-square-foot warehouse and office at Southwest 142nd Street and 142nd Avenue.
Hamaty-Simmonds said it was hard to break into the cruise ship industry, but one ship finally took 200 cakes on consignment "and the entire shipment sold out on the first day of the seven-day cruise."
Now the cake is sold on 140 cruise ships and is the No. 2 seller, behind Absolut Vodka. Even though it's on the expensive side -- the website price is $32.50 for a 33-ounce cake -- the company says Tortuga Rum Cake is the top-selling gift and souvenir item among Caribbean tourists.
As a marketing strategy, the company builds a mailing list of potential customers by offering a monthly drawing for a trip for two to the Cayman Islands, in a promotion co-sponsored by Cayman Airways.
Enter the contest and be added to the mailing list. Tortuga also rushed 300 cakes to the 313th Battalion, an intelligence unit stationed near Baghdad -- and issued a press release -- after receiving a letter from the wife of a North Carolina chaplain saying he was longing for the rum cake he had fallen in love with during a cruise.
Carmen Alexis, president of TABA, related to the audience how she first became introduced to Tortuga Rum Cakes. She was solicited to use the cakes in her business, Just for You Gifts & Baskets, and she took home a sample to try.
"When I went to try it, it was gone," she said. "My husband ate the whole thing."
So she ordered some small cakes to give away, as a token of appreciation to good customers.
"They all started calling me, asking me to put the cakes in their baskets from now on."
If you've never tried Tortuga Rum Cake, I would offer to share my sample. Unfortunately, I ate it. (Hey, it was only a sample size!)
But you can visit the website, www.tortugarum cakes.com or call 305-378-6668. Or, you can shop at the warehouse and get a 30 percent discount.
That would be $22.50 for that 33-ounce cake. Smaller sizes are available. You can buy rum cake, rum fudge, rum-flavored coffee and chocolate hazelnut rum truffles at the warehouse and website, but not Tortuga Rum.
Hamaty-Simmonds said the import of alcoholic beverages is a long and complex process, and they are hoping to have approval by early next year.
Meanwhile, the only place you can buy Tortuga Rum in this area is at Crown Liquors.
If you want to know more about the Tamiami Airport Business Association, call Carmen Alexis at 786-242-0509 or www.giftbasketjustforyou.com.
Angie Niehoff
Niehoff Marketing Associates
6676 Hatteras Drive
Lake Worth, FL 33467
561-868-0297
561-868-0298 fax
305-582-7450 cell
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