British man who helped develop Malibu Rum, Baileys Irish Cream dies

Tom Jago, an inventive British liquor executive who was part of the team that developed Baileys Irish Cream and made it the world’s best-selling liqueur, and later helped establish the Malibu Rum and Johnnie Walker Blue brands, died Oct. 12 in London. He was 93.

His daughter, Rebecca Jago, said he had fractured his neck in a fall the previous week.

Jago was a spirits maven for more than a half-century, reinvigorating old drinks, devising new ones and, in his final years, hunting down casks of forgotten yet still exquisite whiskey in cellars and warehouses in Scotland and other countries to sell in expensive limited editions.

Baileys came to life in 1973 when Jago was in charge of new products for International Distillers & Vintners, or IDV, a British liquor giant.

He hired the consultants David Gluckman and Hugh Seymour-Davies to concoct a new brand of Irish alcoholic drink. They began by mixing Jameson’s Irish whiskey and cream, which together did not initially taste very good, but adding sugar and powdered chocolate, they found, improved the flavor.

“Tom and I were two friends trying to solve the same problem,” Gluckman said in a telephone interview. He recalled how Jago had quickly sent the nascent Irish cream liqueur to IDV’s development group to be refined and then stood by it. “He was a decisive and adventurous client,” Gluckman added, “and we both knew this was a radically new product.”

Jago felt strongly enough about Baileys that he hid from his superiors research showing that consumers had rejected it for tasting like something they would take for indigestion.

“He told the board the research was great, and they started manufacturing it,” Jago said about her father’s dealings with Gilbeys of Ireland, a part of IDV (which was eventually absorbed into Diageo, the multinational beverage company).

His instincts proved correct. Baileys—the first Irish cream liqueur—sold nearly 7 million cases last year, nearly double that of any other liqueur, according to The Spirits Business, a trade magazine.

In 1978, a few years after Baileys reached the market, IDV faced a problem with Coco Rico, a coconut rum. It was being made in South Africa, whose racist apartheid policy had made it an outlaw nation. Jago renamed the rum Malibu, changed its packaging and repositioned it as a Caribbean-style liqueur. Bottling was moved to England, and eventually to Barbados.

Today, Malibu is the world’s second-most popular liqueur, after Baileys, and is owned by Pernod Ricard.