The “Plantation” rum brand presents its new name without “hurtful connotations”

Don’t call it Plantation anymore. Three years after announcing that he was considering a new name, Maison Ferrand, owner of this famous rum brand, has just revealed the new identity. The bottles will now carry Planteray branding, as revealed on the site. beverage department. The first copies with the new name will arrive in France in the second half of 2024.

It therefore took the Charente merchant three long years to create and register this new brand. Which is not easy, as explained in Southwest Alexandre Gabriel, the head of Maison Ferrand.

The new name continues to refer to the plant (“plant”) and adds a solar reference with “ray.”

“Plantation”, a name with “hurtful connotations”

But the word “plantation” has ended, which does not have the same connotation in mainland France as it does in certain overseas territories or former colonies. This is the decision that Alexandre Gabriel made in 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.

In the former colonies, the term “plantation” referred to a type of monoculture in which plants of high economic value were grown primarily for sale in international markets and for which slaves were employed. Sugar cane, origin of rum, was, along with tobacco and cotton, one of the most important crops of this period.

The company specifies, however, that it had not been the subject of protests or calls for a boycott on social networks. “The spirit of the times told us that it was time to change,” explains Angélique Julienne, marketing director of Sud Ouest.

Some large famous brands decided in 2020 to erase all references to archetypes associated with the colonial and slave past. This was the case, in particular, of the rice manufacturer Uncle Ben’s, from the Mars group, which has since become Ben’s Original, or even Aunt Jemima (owned by PepsiCo), which markets dessert preparations, which became Pearl Milling Company in 2021. The terms “uncle” and “aunt” have long referred to older people of color and are now considered racial and racist stereotypes.