While there is a very strong localvore movement here in Vermont, we can protect a lot more forest by selling to export markets than we can by selling in the farmers markets.

In the export market, the big competition is the Canadians, who spend quite a bit of money marketing their syrup worldwide, largely as a single trading cooperative. Their marketing can sometimes sound as though they are talking down the maple syrup produced in the U.S. Speaking to several prospective Asian clients over the last year, as I have, you definitely get the impression that they’re being told frequently about the “unique” qualities of Canadian syrup.

I figure the best answer to that is sending barrels of maple syrup overseas so that people can see for themselves. We produced a brochure for international clients that can be seen here.

In South Korea, there has long been a market for maple sap, rather than maple syrup. They call the sap gorosoe. Sap, however, is impractical to transport half-way across the world, as it requires storage systems similar to those required by milk. Once it’s concentrated into maple syrup, it is sufficiently stable to ship. Reconstituting sap from syrup (adding water) can be done, but it will contain the diluted maple flavor of maple syrup. Uncooked sap does not.

Nancy’s granola manages to retain a lot of maple flavor. She uses our dark commercial syrup that really packs a punch. She sent samples to us of different mixes and production methods, and after a few months of consulting wound up with this particular recipe. I highly recommend people try it. Nancy’s site isn’t up yet, but she can be emailed at nancysgranola-at-yahoo.com.

I used up the last bit with an experiment; pouring milk into a small cup of the granola and using it as a cereal.

It goes to show that there is room in the food market for people who have a passion for tinkering in the kitchen to discover new ways of doing things that set their product on a higher level than anything else out there. Elaine McCabe’s Red Kite Candies also comes to mind, the company that created a new kind of caramel that is so much better than normal caramels, that they should really be called something different. In both cases, the women were relentless about systematically testing different options and methods.

To be filled with maple syrup barrels

Bruce was kind to take me through his new 45,000 square foot maple syrup warehouse facility, just about to come online. A lot of thought went into the design. Bruce is one of the people in the maple syrup business who sells enough and to sufficiently-sensitive food companies so as to have a lot of regulatory scrutiny on his operation. Some of the details in his warehouse may portend changes that will likely ripple through the maple syrup industry, for people selling maple at scale.

Bruce has an 18 inch curb around all internal sides of the buildings, for instance, to provide inspector access behind piles of full barrels. The receiving, storing and packing rooms are put in a certain fashion so that there can be a graduated set of cleanliness standards. In all, he mentioned a couple dozen items that most maple syrup makers will not think to design into a new facility until they’ve done it once or twice and had the food police come and look for trouble.

This new scrutiny, which is not a bad thing all around, might be a bit overkill for maple syrup, which isn’t as dangerous a product as, say, pork. Making forklift drivers in a maple syrup barrel warehouse wear hairnets, for instance, might be entertaining, but isn’t improving our food security. All that said, it’s coming our way, and it will likely be the sort of expensive compliance process that will drive the maple syrup business into farm gate producers versus big packers who can afford a 45,000 square foot maple syrup warehouse. This may prove to be a shift as significant as the dairy industry saw when they forced farmers to build milk houses in the early part of last century.

Price Check for Maple Syrup

Buying Maple Syrup, Price Predicting

If time allows, both will be updated prior to the next season. That will provide interesting longitudinal price data.

Moving Maple Syrup Barrels

This’ll be a two-day process of refiltering the maple syrup, heating it up in the finishing pan and transferring it in batches into our packing unit. We’ll be dealing with three different maple syrup grades from three different barrels, putting it into containers ranging from five gallons to 50 ml maple leafs. That should set us up to be ready for demand in the next few months, as we expect to have less time available with the coming baby.

The problem that needed to get solved was transportation and dispensing of maple syrup to increasingly large bulk maple syrup customers. Once every couple months, I make the rounds in New England, delivering barrels of maple syrup to some very interesting – sometimes innovative – whole sale customers using maple syrup for everything from granola manufacturing to restaurant use to wedding favors, corporate gifts, all the way to theatrical blood simulation. A lot of these businesses have similar issues about storing wholesale maple syrup and using it in their various batch sizes, all the while trying to prevent it from spoiling, crystalizing, etc. Besides, open topped barrels are just plan sticky.

As with our bottles, boxes and other elements, I’ve discovered that borrowing items from other related industries creates a much better economy of scale than purchasing items designed specifically for maple syrup. For instance, our liter bottles of maple syrup fit into wine shippers that cost about one third as much as the equivalent box for the more obscure maple syrup container shapes.

Thus, I came up with the keg scheme for bulk maple syrup. They’re interchangeable, common, and have their own flourishing aftermarket of related products for moving, cleaning and doing pretty much anything to kegs.

The first thing I discovered when I hopped online to learn where to get one for experimentation, was that breweries own their own kegs, and it’s actually quite difficult to come by them. Only when I discovered a brewery going out of business did I get a chance to snag some.

On my way back up from one of these treks across New England, carrying my wholesale maple syrup rounds, I stopped last at the brewery in southern New Hampshire and picked them up. There, a nice young fellow showed me how to open them up and remove the mechanism in the middle that allows for dispensing and pressurization. What he didn’t realize was that the keg he was using as an example happened to have been sitting in the summer sun for a few months with the dregs of a soured stout. When he pushed in the spring-loaded ball, out shot a vile stream of beer-turned-vinegar, splashing all over us. I had 90 minutes to be back up in Vermont for an event, and I didn’t have a change of clothes.

Since then, though, the bulk maple syrup keg idea has taken on some steam. After acquiring some compressed gas tanks and various fittings, we have maple syrup dispensing out of some test kegs, and even have our first household client, who wishes to stick a keg under the sink and have a maple syrup tap on the kitchen counter. Because we’re using nitrogen to replace the air inside as it dispenses, aerobic bacteria cannot grow. Pretty clever, those beer-drinking people.

After a couple more weeks of testing, we’ll be confident that the mechanism won’t get gummed up with our maple syrup, which is just a bit thicker than most. After we do some refrigeration tests and carbonation tests, we’ll green-light the bulk maple syrup kegs to send on to a couple of our business clients.

In particular, we bolted on an I-beam just under the ridge beam, allowing a wheeled trolley to slide back and forth with very heavy loads. You can see from the picture on the right that we made the beam pop out the second story doors, allowing us to hoist loads from trucks below.

And given that our 55 gallon barrels of maple syrup weigh about 650 pounds, we added a surprisingly cheap winch crane to attach to the trolley. If this contraption doesn’t kill one of us, it’ll be very handy. Most of our bulk maple syrup, intended for wholesale use, will be hoisted up into this second story for storage over the year.

Once the barrels make it through the doorway, we can drop them onto dollies and push them around. To accommodate this, the floor system up there was built 12-inch-on-center, with heftier stringers than you’d put in a residential structure.

Just because they felt like it, the boys opted to build the barn post-and-beam. Its a pretty old-timey structure, with about all of the design conforming to specific sugaring use. That seemed like a compromise at first, but it’s the more beautiful for it.

Robert and the boys have since thought they  might build these sorts of structures for other folks, seeing how smoothly this one went up. They went and created the site Vermont Cedar Cabins and have been doing some work in this line.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, we need to get the 600 gallon sap tank installed up top. Lots of vacuum plumbing yet to be done. That tank will have a four-inch pipe coming out of it, where we can operate a big butterfly valve from below to start the sap filling up our utility vehicle tank for transport over to the sugar shack. This’ll be quite a tweaking process. It doesn’t take much time for a four-inch pipe of sap coming from 18 feet off the ground to get someone wet. Should be interesting.

I’ve set up a small finishing room in the back, and that’s been working out nicely. We’ll be able to get the barrels up stairs started with heating (purchased a used barrel warmer), and then pipe it on down to get to sterile temperatures for packing.

[Average prices for maple syrup in various towns across the U.S.]

The upshot: retail prices for maple syrup are higher than we anticipated. The average location of more than 30 chosen randomly across the U.S. sold maple syrup for about $96.50 per gallon. Of course, this was sold in smaller units, making the out-of-pocket cost seem more reasonable. The average unit size for the cheapest maple syrup offered in the store was 18.8 ounces, which of course means that the average unit sold was smaller than that. We saw locally that – in the face of short supply – many retailers sold smaller units at higher prices, and this may have happened across the country as well. We will be able to see that in future years as we repeat this research to get year-to-year data. Several locations reported that they were out of half gallons and gallons of maple syrup that they once sold.

Probably the most notable unanticipated fact we found – aside from the high price of real maple syrup – was the high price of fake maple syrup. The average price for fake maple syrup was $26.13 per gallon, sold almost always in a 12-ounce container. The range of fake maple syrup prices was even greater than that of the real maple syrup. The cheapest fake maple syrup (I shudder to think of it) cost $5.19 per gallon. The most expensive: $35.73. When maple syrup packers complain to maple syrup producers about how the market cannot sustain prices above $4 per pound, remind them of that last number. Perhaps suggest that they go into the corn syrup business. I’m sure there’s a heck of a profit margin in that.

[Merced, CA - home of the very urgent syrup eaters]

Real maple syrup ranged from $74.96 in Willmar, Minnesota to the ludicrously high price of $131.94 in Merced, California. I should note that in each of these randomly chosen towns I called at least three different grocery stores and got at least two data points for each town. Interestingly, prices tended to keep to a much more narrow range within a town versus between stores in different towns. This suggests that there are significant regional effects on price, such as distance from producers, cultural use of maple syrup and local cost of living. I’ve put together some charts to explore those.

[Willmar, MN - looks like each home has its own maple tree]

Out of 30+ stores, six reported that they either didn’t sell real maple syrup or that they were out of it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that only two clerks showed some confusion about there being a difference between real maple syrup and fake maple syrup. The nation’s epicenter for not selling real maple syrup is Petersburg, Virginia. Three stores of five queried didn’t sell it. The one chain that did sell maple syrup (Ukrops) charged only $79.96 per gallon. Ukrops is a relatively high-end local chain that is well known for its prepared foods. That Ukrops charges about 15 percent below the national average for retail maple syrup prices and its competitors don’t sell maple syrup at all suggests that there might just be something wrong with the people who come from the greater Richmond area. Just saying.

Very unexpectedly, the cost of living differences between the towns seemed to have no discernable effect on maple syrup price. In other words, rich towns didn’t seem to charge on average higher prices than those seen in poorer towns. It appears as though the setting of maple syrup prices is based on very tough to predict market factors, such as the number of distributors and middle men in the distribution chain, and that market demand forces don’t seem to exert much of a controlling influence on this. The towns selected ranged in cost of living adjustment factors of 85 percent to 106 percent, averaging at 95 percent. This lower than 100 average is due to the fact that no major coastal cities were included in the data set.

When looking at the distribution of prices, as in the chart below, it seems as though there is a relatively thin floor in pricing extending between $75 per gallon and $90 per gallon of maple syrup. This suggests that the cheaper prices sold “retail” directly by maple syrup producers are the anomalies in the market. This is very likely the explanation as to why government data is not reflective of reality for the general consumer. In maple syrup-producing regions, which account for a very small percent of the U.S. population, people may be able to purchase syrup for $48 a gallon, as they can here at a local maple syrup farm in Thetford. But that same maple syrup producer can sell the same gallon for quite a bit higher elsewhere.

[Data set of 25 prices per gallon of maple syrup]

The distance from the major maple syrup producing state – Vermont – and the town in question does appear to have an influence on price. The further away from Vermont , not surprisingly, the higher the price of maple syrup, with some exceptions. The bar chart of the prices in the different towns (top chart) is organized by distance from Thetford, VT. The trend to higher maple syrup prices the further away you get is pretty obvious. This may be explained almost entirely by shipping costs. Most methods of moving maple syrup from one coast to the other cost about $20 per gallon.

It should be noted that all of these calls were made in February 2009, just prior to the new production season. This is the time of the lowest inventories of maple syrup and the time least likely to confuse the influences of two different maple syrup seasons in the market.

As with all data-oriented research studies, some of the most interesting stuff came out of the “verbatims,” or things said on the phone by the folks answering the questions. These aren’t necessarily representative, but it’s interesting to see these ideas floating out there, affecting in a very real way the maple syrup purchase decisions of people calling up a store to ask about a product:

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“All the grades taste the same, but the colors are different”

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“This actually isn’t that expensive for this product”

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“The Maple Grove brand must be better than this other one, because the other one is the store’s brand.”

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“There’s a generic brand, but you probably don’t want that.”

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“I can’t stand the fake stuff.”

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“We use honey or karo”

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“There used to be a lot more sizes”

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“Oh my god”

I knew I’d be upgrading to a larger used rig when we were sitting around a boil in the middle of last season. It was me, the two Roberts and John wondering why our new tricks (a homemade pre-heater, an improvised forced draft unit and a few other things, like dry wood) weren’t bringing our number of gallons boiled per hour much higher than it was the year before. We went from about 12 gallon an hour to just shy of 20 gallons an hour. When you have 800 taps, that’s not a lot of gallons, even with the ancient reverse osmosis machine we’d located and cobbled into some sort of working order. If each tap pushed out a gallon of sap in a day – a typical decent run day – we would be boiling at least 10 hours. Add a couple slow hours when starting up in the afternoon and some cleanup time at the end, and you might find yourself seeing the change of light toward dawn before slogging home.

So, sitting there during the boil with the other boys, I took the cordless phone and dialed up Leader Evaporator, finding their number on the back of a catalog. I spoke to a tired-sounding sales guy who proceeded to tell me that a 3×8 air-tight, wood fired arch with a new suit of their best pans would get to something close to $24,000. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered the number to the guys. They immediately set to arguing about which piece of information I’d managed to screw up in relating our requirements to the sales rep. I told the fellow I’d stop wasting his time and went back to the boil and to the argument.

From that day on, we knew we’d be looking for an old-time rig that we could rescue. While the year before I’d seen plenty of wood fired evaporators in the classifieds section, suddenly they’d gone missing. With #2 fuel oil passing the $4 mark, people were sidelining oil rigs and snapping up the units coming on the market that used wood. That and the prices of stainless steel might explain a lot why Leader was demanding a starting year’s salary for an evaporator.

This past summer I found myself out in Enfield helping a friend of a friend look at the sugaring equipment that came with a house and garage he’d bought. He had no intent to sugar, but figured he’d ask me what the stuff was worth. It was a 3×10 wood fired Grimm from 1994. Pretty good condition. Raised flues, stainless, although the sugar pan looked like it had gone through some abuse. It came with steam hoods and all the stack pieces someone could possibly use. I’d made a list of prices for him, that I promptly forgot until a few months later, when my search for a used 3×8 unit proved fruitless.

This morning we picked up that unit, after taking a piece of the west wall of the sugarhouse off so that we could fit the new unit inside. After a century of disuse, this old chicken shack is about to burst its seams with both bulky equipment and the buzz of industry. I owe a big one to the Roberts, John and Mike for wasting a Saturday helping me get this monster over state lines. The picture above is of the trailer that had the 600 gallon feed tank and the evaporator behind it, with the back end just poking over the hitch. The rig filled that, the inside of the truck, and two additional pickups.

For those who’ve never done it, moving an evaporator involves knocking out the fire bricks one by one, transporting them, and then lifting the unit onto whatever is going to transport it. In general, it takes about three times as long you think it will.

The picture below shows the big rig in our shack, with Mike bringing in some bricks from the truck. Later, when we put the pans and hoods on the arch, the whole mass of metal reached just five inches below those cross beams on the ceiling. I still have to brick the arch in, but that’ll wait till worse weather this winter, and in the meantime, we’ll try to get the woods work done before the snow builds too high to work the line.

Where to Start?

Start with your bottle. The materials, shapes and sizes all affect shipping, sometimes in unanticipated ways (for a quick review of different materials advantages and disadvantages, see this older post. People tend to like plastic best for sending by mail, but I’ve had about as good luck with plastic as with glass – which is to say some pretty messy packages for every couple hundred ones sent without incident. You tend to pack glass with greater care. In fact, the only accidents I’ve had with glass have been bottle stoppers coming out in transit, rather than the glass rupturing. On the other hand, the plastic fiascos I’ve see involved rupturing, almost always at the interface between the container and the cap.

When people buy maple syrup for practical purposes – like putting in their coffee each morning – they tend to order plastic bottles, which is often cheaper than maple syrup sold in glass bottles (2007 proved the exception to the rule, when petroleum prices went so high that packing in glass was actually cheaper). Several companies make special plastic syrup jugs with oxygen barrier coatings that prevent the syrup from going bad after a few months. They also have the charm of fitting into those single-price/send-anywhere boxes that the United States Postal Service markets. All-in-all, a pretty efficient way to get a lot of weight of maple syrup across a lot of country.

For maple syrup operations doing bulk and wholesale business, shipping five gallon pails or larger barrels becomes the rule, more often using UPS or FedEx Freight for pick-ups. On a dollar-per-gallon sent ratio, larger barrels of wholesale maple syrup typically cost about $7 to $12 for moving across the country, depending on scale, location, need for a lift-gate truck and several other factors.

On the higher end of the market – and especially for gift bottles – customers tend to like to order glass bottles. Choosing the right size here is trickier. With all the cushioning that glass requires in the box, you can throw out those single-price boxes from the USPS, as they won’t be big enough. That hurts not just because of the loss of the low postage opportunity, but also because the USPS springs for the box. Now you’re really on your own.

Choose a bottle that fits with a box and packaging. I think I had a good idea a couple years back, realizing that the one-liter flask bottles are roughly the same proportions as a wine bottle. This was important because many, many wine producers send wine bottles by mail, which means there’s a small industry of companies that make special packaging for sending this very size of glass bottle through the mail. After spending $2.20 on a glass bottle, and $1.50 on a special mailer, a liter of syrup (about 3 pounds of syrup) cost an additional $10 to ship to most places east of the Mississippi from the maple syrup boondocks of Vermont. At 2008 prices, that was about 30 percent the cost of the liter of syrup. Folks buying bottles four at a time saw that shipping and packaging cost amount to only about 12 percent of the cost of the syrup. When you see that actual Vermonters must pay 6 percent sales tax for transactions made in the Green Mountain state, that’s actually not so bad for shipping and packaging costs to out-of-staters.

Sugar makers tend to like USPS versus UPS and Fedex, probably because of the flat rate boxes. When you give customers a choice, though, they tend to choose UPS or Fedex, even though it’s clear to them that it’ll cost more. I find that very interesting, and I suspect it’s due to a perception that greater care is given to packages at the private companies. Tillinghastmaple.com stopped offering Fedex and UPS simply because having a mish mash of shippers makes fulfilling orders much more painful. Besides, it gives me an excuse to visit with our local postal clerks, Bob and Henry, although I suspect they’d be happy to seem me go to UPS when the Christmas maple syrup gift rush is on.

Syrup is heavy stuff – 11.4 pounds per gallon, not including the container. Heavy stuff is much more likely to have accidents, spillages or packaging escapes, as the item’s own weight creates a momentum when its moving that can be pretty destructive when it comes to an abrupt stop. And, as it happens, getting maple syrup all over a customer’s mail tends to make them pretty irritable. The weight is also one of three key factors in determining the price of sending a package – along with distance sent and desired delivery speed.

Make sure that the maple syrup is completely immobilized within the packaging. Any room for movement – including after some of the packing settles – will lead to some degree of shock force on the container. When you introduce a new type of container or packaging, it’s best to test one out by doing a few drop tests on a hard surface.

People selling syrup online may be tempted to offer free shipping, but those costs could be a lot higher than anticipated, as the folks most attracted to that offer are often the ones who live the furthest away, causing a much higher than average shipping cost. It’s also an odd form of subsidy for western and southern states. If you think about it, a maple syrup producer who pays for shipping is effectively charging New England states and those nearby a higher amount than those to whom he’s shipping maple syrup in Hawaii and California.

Repackaging

It often makes more sense – and can be kind of fun – to order syrup in bulk and then split the larger amount into many smaller containers to send on to friends and family. Keep in mind that syrup intended to be stored any length of time should be “hot packed,” and you can find directions on how to do that properly here.