Madkaud heirs

From 1884 onwards, Martinique's sugar industry was in crisis. Félicien Madkaud, trained in distillation techniques, decided to buy a sugar refinery and convert it into an agricultural rum distillery. Madkaud rum was born in 1895.

Félicien, the youngest of 9 children, was born in 1857 after the abolition of slavery, but his parents and some of his brothers had been slaves. Félicien, who married a woman from a Bordeaux family of spirits merchants, is therefore doubly the symbol of a successful man.

Three generations of the Madkaud family succeeded one another at the head of the distillery until 1965, when it closed, unable at the time to cope with the rising cost of local labor through mechanization.
In the 60s, Martinique was faced with the introduction of social security, financed by employers' contributions, forcing distilleries to improve their work tools and automate their production, at least in part, or risk going out of business.

The Madkaud family may have reconverted to import-export and construction, but they still retained an interest in rum with the "La Digue" brand. In 2006, Stéphane Madkaud, 4 generations after his grandfather Félicien, took over the business, then in commercial difficulty, and renamed the brand "Héritier Madkaud", with the aim of perpetuating the family tradition.
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