LUDLOW, Vt. — For owners of the kind of mom-and-pop business that has been getting crushed in the recession, Ann and Doug Rose have had a pretty good year.
A steady stream of customers has been snapping up sweets from the shelves of Green Mountain Sugar House, their red-roofed shop at the foot of the Okemo Mountain ski area. Maple sugar, maple nut brittle, maple fudge, leaf-shaped maple candies, and big plastic jugs of syrup — all of it has been selling surprisingly well.
The Roses provide a feel-good product that people buy even in hard times, but that’s not the only reason business is booming. Their livelihood depends more on the fickle whims of Mother Nature than the worries coming from Wall Street. In 2008, she was good to many sugar makers in Vermont, the largest producer in the United States. She was bad to the world’s largest maple syrup producer, Canada, dumping unusually heavy snow on Quebec’s maple forests, which caused a worldwide syrup shortage.
Maple syrup, as much a symbol of the Green Mountain State as covered bridges and fiery autumn foliage, is selling at record high prices, both wholesale and retail. That has translated into a better-than-expected 2008 for many of Vermont’s 2,000 businesses that make the sticky stuff some call liquid gold.
“I don’t think there’s been a better time to be in the maple industry,” said Doug Rose, who has the dirty jeans, stitched-together boots, and ruddy features of a man who does his work in the wilderness, and the ready, friendly laugh of someone who loves what he does for a living.
Last Tuesday, Rose was out walking the line in his sugar bush: That’s sugar maker-speak for tending to 250 acres of sugar maple forest. This time of year, he prunes his trees, makes sure the plastic lines that carry sap from his 10,000 taps will flow freely when the sugar season starts in February, and troubleshoots the sophisticated machinery that will deliver the sap to storage tanks, from which container trucks will take it to the small processing facility in an annex of his shop.
Harvesting maple syrup has come a long way from the days when it meant sticking a tap into a maple tree and putting a bucket underneath it.
Newfangled vacuum systems suck the sap out of the tree much faster than the old drip method, and are effective at much colder temperatures.
Machinery extracts water from the sap using a technique called reverse osmosis, which takes a fraction of the time and cost of boiling it down the old-fashioned way.
“It’s not just a drip coming out of a tree anymore,” Rose said. “It’s science.” Amid a controlled chaos of snowshoes, steel tanks, various contraptions and supplies, the syrup is filtered, refined and either canned or sent off to the kitchen, where Ann Rose makes the candy.
In the store, buyers buzz with delight over the maple offerings and exchange recipes with the cashier. The higher prices — the Roses in 2007 charged about $46.95 for a gallon of syrup; now it’s $66.00 — have not deterred customers, who say they are sticking with their favorite sweet.
“I use maple syrup in the morning on my cereal and in my coffee. I need sweetener, and this is the one,” said Frank Wingate, a retiree from Ludlow who has been coming to the sugar house for the 40 years the Roses have owned it. When his four grandchildren visit from Connecticut, they clamor for his wife’s French toast with maple syrup. When the Wingates visit their grandchildren, they replace the store-bought syrup they find in their kitchen with “the real stuff.” The Vermont Maple Outlet in Jeffersonville also had a “very good year,” said Rick Marsh, the fifth-generation owner of his family’s retail-and mail-order business, which is in its 99th season.
But Marsh, who is also president of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, said the booming business is only a short-term boon.
While retailers, mail-order businesses, and wholesalers in Vermont have been able to charge higher prices without a significant increase in costs in 2008, the lack of supply from Canada — which produces up to 85 percent of the world’s syrup — over the long run could hurt the whole industry.
In recent years, Marsh said, demand for syrup has grown, as major food companies have switched from other sweeteners to maple syrup in their products. In 2008, Marsh said, without the Canadian surplus, supplies of bulk syrup quickly dried up, and some companies stopped ordering: He mentioned a yogurt company that no longer buys maple syrup, and a restaurant chain that has begun mixing large quantities of corn syrup into the maple syrup it serves.
“We’ve lost market share that we won’t be able to get back for years,” he said. In recent years, the Canadian surplus has meant low prices for bulk syrup that have made it hard for small producers to make ends meet. Anthony Rainville, who operates 500 taps in Franklin, Vt., works full time at a Ben & Jerry’s and part time as a deputy sheriff. In 2008, he said, the price he’s been able to charge for bulk syrup rose from $31.90 a gallon in April to $44 a gallon by the end of the year.
“I won’t be able to retire on it, but it pays for itself,” he said.
Vermont producers might be making a killing now, but they also remember the years when Vermont had poor crops.
“We depend on the weather to produce the right conditions, and if that doesn’t happen, we take a pounding,” said Jacques Couture, who runs the Couture Maple Shop and Bed & Breakfast in Westfield, Vt. In 2008, his mail order business outperformed his expectations.
“It kind of surprised us that sales through the Christmas season remained strong, given what we knew about the economy and the high price of syrup,” he said.
But there was no time to celebrate. Couture spent the morning of New Year’s Eve tramping around in knee-deep snow just south of the Canadian border, trying to remove fallen trees from the 40 miles of tubing that connect the 7,500 taps that feed his operation. He had to move quickly. If any of the lines choked by fallen branches got buried in the snow, he would have trouble fixing them by the beginning of sap season, when every drop matters.
“I can’t afford to have them stop,” he said. “Who knows what next spring will bring?”
Globe correspondent Stewart Bishop contributed to this report.
