The Economics of Everyday Things - 106. Maple Syrup

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Pure maple syrup can be five times as expensive as “pancake syrup,” but maple farmers — and breakfast connoisseurs — say it’s worth it. Zachary Crockett pours it on thick. SOURCES:Emma Marvin, co-C.E.O. of Butternut Mountain Farm.David Marvin, founder of Butternut Mountain Farm. RESOURCES:"Crop Production," by National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA, 2025)."Why Americans Overwhelmingly Prefer Fake Maple Syrup," by Christopher Ingraham (The Washington Post, 2015)."History of Maple," (UVM Libraries).Butternut Mountain Farm.

At her family farm in Vermont, Emma Marvin can sense the passage of time. There are places where you stand, and the realization sort of flows over you that I was here five years ago. My dad was here 25 years ago, maybe. My grandfather might have visited this tree. There is a temporal, connection that's really different with this kind of work.

Maple Serp is the embodiment of a cultural practice in the Northeast that dates back centuries. Marvin is the co-CEO of Butternut Mountain Farm, a maple syrup company that she runs with her brother. And for her, the sweet, sticky, golden brown liquid is more than just a breakfast topping. Maple syrup is sunlight, captured by a plant. We're harvesting a tiny, bit of the stored carbon from the tree, and everything else stays intact. The way maple syrup production works, there is economic incentive to be great stewards of the northern forest. Creation of this product has so much additional value beyond the product itself. Maple syrup is the end result of a long process that starts with the sap of maple tree.

What it's not is table syrup, the stuff made by brands like Log Cabin and Mrs. Butterworths, which contain corn syrup and preservatives. To be called maple syrup, it can only contain the sap of the maple tree. That's it. There is nothing except a lot of effort added to maple syrup. But all of that effort makes for a pricey product. A gallon of Butternut Mountain Farms grade A Maple Tree. syrup is around five times more expensive than a gallon of Mrs. Butterworths. So, is it worth it? It is hard to convert people from the less expensive table syrups or pancake serps to pure maple. Cost is a big factor, but when people have made this commitment to try the real thing, 99 out of 100 will say, this is really amazing and I'm not going back. Those small luxuries are, for those of us who can have them,

really an important part of life to me. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, maple syrup. Maple syrup producers often call themselves sugar farmers. In the simplest terms, they collect sap from maple trees and reduce it to sugar. It's a tradition that goes back thousands of years. Indigenous people in North America use stone tools to gash the trunks of trees

and concentrated sap into hard chunks of sugar through rounds of freezing or boiling. For most of the time that Europeans had been here, it was a less expensive sugar than, say, cane sugar. That's David Marvin, Emma's father, and the founder of Butternut Mountain Farm. It was something that could be homemade. From the Revolutionary War through the Civil War, Vermont Maple Sugar was positioned as an American-made product that could reduce the U.S.'s dependence on Caribbean cane sugar produced by slaves.

By the end of the 19th century, Vermont farmers were producing 14 million pounds of maple sugar. In the decades after the Civil War, the price of cane sugar dropped, and maple sugar makers shifted their output to syrup. But making it was a laborious process that involved boiling down sap for long hours over an open fire to reach the right density. And for many years, it remained a niche product. Fifty-plus years ago, the maple industry was just a marginal, almost inconsequential part of farming. It had been a way for hill farmers to make some money, either,

to pay off the grain bill from the winter or to buy seed and fertilizer to get started in the spring. And it wasn't really an industry in any way. When David started Butternut Mountain Farm in 1972, producing maple syrup as a standalone product was a

novel and to many, crazy idea. But technical advances eventually lowered the energy costs and shortened the time required to produce maple syrup, helping to rebound the industry. It seemed to me like Wow, I could just go to the woods with a little bit of capital and some energy and labor

and come out with a really valuable product. Today, maple syrup is a small but mighty industry. Global production in 2024 was around 25 million gallons, enough to fill 38 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And pretty much all of that comes from North America. Here's Emma Marvin. Maple syrup is only produced in the geography. of the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada as far west as Minnesota and Wisconsin,

as far south as Virginia and Kentucky, and then north through New England into Quebec and New Brunswick. Canada has a stronghold on the maple syrup industry, producing 73% of the world's supply. Most of the rest comes from the northeastern U.S. In particular, Vermont, which makes around $95 million worth of the stuff every year. There's a reason for this geographic specificity. Syrup comes primarily from the sap of sugar, black, and red maple trees, which naturally grow in this region.

On its property in Johnson, Vermont, Butternut Mountain Farm has more than 30,000 of them. In a process called tapping, small holes, are drilled into the trunk, and plastic spouts are inserted to collect sap. It's labor-intensive work. We're going out and visiting 30,000 trees on the slope of a mountain. There may be a couple of inches of snow, but much more likely a couple of feet of snow. Snow machines, four-wheelers make getting into the woods a little bit easier, but ultimately we're putting snow shoes on our feet

and trekking from tree to tree. It takes about 40 years for a tree to become a size where we feel comfortable tapping it. And how long can a tree be tapped? Hundreds of years. This sap has to be collected during a window in the winter and early spring when the nights are freezing and the days are moderately warm.

For sugar makers in Vermont, the sweet spot tends to run. from February through late April or early May. It is that freeze thaw that creates the pressure dynamic within the tree that allows sap movement. The sap flows through the taps into a complex collection system.

Historically, it was sap collected in a bucket, maybe gathered with horses. Today, almost universally, maple sap is collected using a system of tubing. So pipeline that connects the trees to tanks or directly to a sugarhouse where we're making that transformation from sap to serp happen. There's like a system of tubes connected to these trees that all sort of like run into a central vats or something. A hundred miles of tubing is not an exaggeration, probably.

This immense tubing network is controlled by a system of pressure gauge. to ensure that the sap can flow as long as possible. Emma's grandfather, James Marvin, was a researcher who studied the mechanism of sap flow in sugar maple trees. It was his work that led to the development of these systems. A sap run can be anything from a slow drip to a gusher. Wow, that must be exciting to see. Yeah, it is. It can also be a little daunting.

Maple sap is highly perishable. And so when the sap is flowing, you've got to be ready to go. Sap is mostly water, and that water needs to be removed to concentrate sap into syrup. That takes place in a building called a sugar house. You can't make maple syrup without heat. That is what develops the characteristic color and flavor compounds. In the 1970s, syrup makers began using reverse osmosis to concentrate their sap quickly. The sap is forced into a semi-permeable membrane that only allows water molecules to pass through,

isolating sap with a higher sugar concentration. It allows sugar makers to cut their boiling time down significantly. Before reverse osmosis was introduced, David Martin tried planting trees with higher sugar content. intent in their sap. My dad and I planted trees back in the 1960s. The real interest in planting trees back in the 60s and 70s was in using sweeter genetic stock in order to make syrup more affordably. But then in the mid-70s, I came on this idea of using reverse osmosis, and it was almost an epiphany. I needed to just use the healthiest trees in the wild forest as our producer, we could take that 2% tree and turn it into a 20%

sap yield. This highly concentrated sugar sap is then boiled down further in an evaporator. The key is getting maple syrup to the correct density. Too light and it'll ferment. Too dense and the sugar will crystallize. What it is is a series of pans that are overheat. So think of it as a maze that the sap might go through. series of flus where the thinner sap pushes the thickening sap through to a point where it's

ready to be drawn off at that density of maple syrup. When all is said and done, it takes around 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And the final product comes in a spectrum of colors, each with a different flavor profile. Typically, early in the season, we tend to see lighter colors, more delicate flavors produced when the weather is colder as the season progresses and the daytime temperatures get warmer. We tend to see darker colors, stronger flavors in the SERP that's being produced. In 2013, the International Maple Syrup Institute created new international maple syrup institute created new international. nationally recognized standards to sell the product. You've got golden, delicate at the lightest end of the spectrum.

It is subtly flavored. Has vanolin is buttery. The next category would be amber rich, dark robust, has a more earthy caramel flavor profile to it. There's also very strong dark, which can be anywhere from a deep brown to almost black in color. It has a very earthy taste with hints of brown sugar. Syrup classes are used in different ways, golden for a cocktail, amber for pancakes,

and the darker ones for baking. Any syrup that doesn't meet these grade A standards for color, clarity, density, and flavor, is called processing grade. If syrup has some kind of flavor defect, like a sour flavor, It goes into this category called processing grade, where it's really great as an ingredient, but probably would be an unhappy surprise on your pancakes in the morning. This includes so-called buddy sap, which is sap collected late in the season when maple trees begin to bud. If you ever have an opportunity to taste or smell it, you'll know. but it is often characterized as maybe chocolatey or could be like locker room.

Locker room and chocolatey are two very different things. It's a spectrum. You can't miss it when it's happening. Across the industry, different grades of maple syrup often carry different prices, with the lightest and rarest golden syrup, usually commanding top dollar. Butternut Mountain Farm charges $69 per gallon for their top three. grade A syrups, about $10 more than the average Vermont maple syrup. But for the Marvin family, it can be hard to predict the financial outcome of all this

labor in any given year. Like other agricultural work, the maple syrup business is rife with uncertainty. As producers, none of us have any real indicator of what crop yields are going to be in any given season. When people ask me, what's the season going to be? be like, I often laughed and say, like, I'll tell you when it's over. That's coming up. For the first 30 years of running Butternut Mountain Farm, David and Marvin relied on other forms of income. He raised and sold Christmas trees in the offseason to supplement his maple syrup sales. Today, the business has diversified in other ways. The Marvin's operator retail shop

Marvin's Country Store, where they sell maple syrup and other maple products under their own brand. They also provide forest management services to other sugar makers who might need help caring for their trees. But the majority of their revenue comes from serving as a distributor for smaller maple farms. So the way it works is we purchase the syrup in bulk in drums from the farms we work with. We store it, and then we bottle it, and then we... We sell it to our customers who are mostly intermediary to the consumer. They cover the gamut from mass market and grocery to mail order, industrial markets, all of that. It's not a good business model because we buy all this inventory or commit to buy it in the spring,

and we market it over the next 12 months until the next crop year. So we have a big cost of holding inventory. For smaller farms, selling syrup to Butternut Mountain Farm is a better option than competing in the broader market. Selling maple syrup can be a game of volume. You need a large enough tract of land to be economical today. In recent years, some farms have used to downturn in the New England timber industry as an opportunity to expand their footprint. land that was in timber production, a lot of it has been sold by the timber industry directly to producers. The returns to farming in maple have been strong enough that maple producers have been buying land and continue to to this day pretty aggressively.

When you think about sugaring as sort of like a cost per acre enterprise, would you say it favorably stacks up to other forms of farming? It does. It's not maybe as high as corn or potatoes, but it's pretty high. Off the top of my head, I would say we can generate maybe $250 per acre of gross income. That's the syrup value from each acre. And it's a sustained yield compared to timber. You know, if I cut my maple woods, I get a check every 25 years. If I sugar, I get a check every year. In the U.S., maple syrup prices are tracked by the United States Department of Agriculture. The retail price for a gallon of Vermont maple syrup in 2024 was about $58. The wholesale price was around $42. And at the lowest end, larger bulk volumes sell at a rate of $28. All of these prices are up from the previous year. Again, here's David's daughter, Emma Marvin.

there is a quasi-governmental entity that represents the producers in the province, and that entity has authority to set prices, maintain a quota, and also maintain a reserve. That, coupled with the fact that Quebec produces most of the world's supply, sets a relative floor or really sets the landscape for what pricing looks like for maple syrup. Obviously, there's been a lot of focus on Canada lately with the tariffs. Is there any speculation that tariffs might lead to more U.S. production or have any kind of impact on businesses like yours? Has there been any speculation? I mean, yes. Is there anything definitive or concrete? No. Maple is complicated. 70% of the world supply comes from Canada. 60% of that flows into the U.S. Does a changing economic and trade landscape have the potential to have radical impacts here? Absolutely, what are they?

That's much harder to understand, particularly in a volatile environment like this. And the physical environment is just as volatile. As the climate changes, it's increasing the unpredictability of sap yields each season. Undoubtedly, Maple Serp is going to continue to exist into the future. But we're seeing changes over decades and decades in terms of when the sugaring season is starting. It's starting earlier and ending earlier.

We are seeing loss of tree species, less diversity, and that is a real threat for the industry. What worries me is the violent storms and potential wind impacts. So we've had a number of hurricanes here in Vermont in the last 20 years. Another threat to the maple syrup business is the rise of table syrup, a competing product on store shelves made from corn syrup. It was designed to mimic the flavor of real maple syrup. One of the biggest challenges the maple industry has, had is that most consumers don't understand the difference between maple syrup and pancake syrup.

Most people are maybe having maple syrup at a special breakfast once a month on the weekends. That kind of interaction with pure maple syrup doesn't leave a lot of opportunity for folks to think about the product. A 2015 consumer survey found that 70% of Americans preferred table syrup to the real stuff. Producers have had to convince the public that maple is worth a hefty price premium. And that battle is waged one customer at a time. The silver lining for us is we have people who chose to try the real thing and they're not going back to artificial. They may not eat maple seven days a week, but they will make it their enjoyment. But for the Marvins, maple syrup isn't just for special occasions.

It's a part of everyday life, both out in the forest and in the kitchen. I think about maple syrup every day. It goes into my coffee in the morning. Salad dressings, marauds, pasta sauces, maple with Asian flavor pairings is phenomenal. Maple is good with just about everything. I think the only thing I've not really been super fond of as a pairing with maple is maybe avocado. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston.

We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rapsin. And thanks to Shane Kirkland, Paul Ely, Miles Quillin, and Eric Park for suggesting this topic. If you have an idea for an episode, feel free to email us at Everyday Things at Freakonomics.com. Our inbox is always open. All right, until next week. I think I just realized I've been saying the word syrup wrong my whole life. Like, I say syrup, and it's... Sounds like you say syrup.

I do say syrup, although my mind has been polluted now that you've said it the other way. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher.