Quebec liqueur company caught in crossfire of U.S. alcohol ban
LS Cream Liqueur is based in Laval, Que., but produced, bottled in the U.S.
A liqueur company says it's been bottled up with its American counterparts and pulled from SAQ store shelves — despite being based in Laval, Que.
The founder of LS Cream Liqueur, Stevens Charles, says he started receiving concerned text messages from customers unable to find the Haitian-style drink after U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs came into effect last week.
"The way that it looks right now, it looks like LS Cream is part of the problem," he told CBC's Daybreak.
Though headquartered in Laval, Charles says the company bottles its product in the U.S., a decision it made after it struggled to enter the Quebec market via the call for tender process when it was starting out around 2014.
After a year in business, Charles says the province's liquor board, the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ), began placing orders for his product.
"We've been a fairly good success for all those years because as you know, if you don't perform, they never reorder again. And we've been selling out all our orders ever since," he said.
The cream liqueur is inspired by the Haitian celebratory drink crémas, which is infused with nutmeg, cinnamon, star anise, among other ingredients reminiscent of the holidays.
The SAQ, for its part, says it considers LS Cream Liqueur to be a U.S. product, reiterating the statement it issued when the Quebec government asked it to pull American alcohol from its shelves.
The removal "includes wines, spirits, locally bottled American products, and beers in transit intended for brewers," according to the statement.
LS Cream is produced in Buffalo, N.Y., bottled in Florida, then shipped to a depot in New Jersey where the SAQ typically picks it up for import to Canada.
Charles says he's reached out to the board about his unique situation but says he hasn't heard back, adding that he hopes a compromise can be reached. He says that he understands the ban but hopes the board can see that his is not the "embodiment of a U.S.-based company."
Last year, the board featured an interview with Charles and his co-founder Myriam Jean-Baptiste on its site highlighting them for Black History Month.
"We're Haitian-Canadians that bottle [an] ancestral recipe from Haiti. That's the story. We're not a chameleon, we're not trying to be Canadian here, U.S. there."
Charles, who lives with his family in Laval, says he's looking into possibly adding operations in Canada, but says it's complicated.
"If everything was easy we would have done it a long time ago, but unfortunately, it's not."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from CBC Daybreak