With a short sugaring season and low sugar content in sap, Vermont’s maple syrup producers have had a tough year.
Now, many small sugarmakers face a new challenge: a shortage of plastic maple syrup jugs.
When sugarmakers tried to place their orders at the beginning of the year, they discovered their usual suppliers had 40-week lead times. And now, as their stores of plastic jugs run low, they are trying to figure out how to stick it out until the fall.
Betsy Luce is co-owner of Sugarbush Farm, a family-owned maple farm in Woodstock that she said has been making syrup for 45 years. At the beginning of each year, the farm buys a “tractor trailer load” of plastic jugs with the farm’s logo, she said, and they typically arrive 10 weeks later. This year, the order she placed in January will arrive 10 months later — in October.
In the meantime, Luce said the farm has been buying blank jugs from a variety of sugarmaking equipment suppliers.
“Once a month, we call around to all the various ones and see if they’ve gotten any more in, and we send our truck right down that day before somebody else buys them,” she said.
But that option is more expensive, Luce said, because it adds another middleman and, with it, a 50- to 75-cent increase in the price per jug.
Temporary solutions for plastic jug delays have meant added expenses for many small sugarmakers. April Lemay, owner of April’s Maple in Canaan, has switched to unlabeled jugs while she waits for an order that her supplier said should arrive in October or November.
For Lemay, there’s been no problem so far in getting plain plastic jugs. The delays are for jugs printed with the sugarmaker’s logo. She now has to order paper labels for the jugs and apply them by hand.
“It’s more expensive,” she said. “It takes more time, which is also expensive.”
But for some, even plain jugs are not easy to come by. Meghan Jarvis, co-owner of the Vermont Maple Farm in Corinth, said she called around after her normal supplier told her to expect 40-week delays. Though she eventually found some jugs, “because everyone else is in the same situation, it really wasn’t easy,” she said.
Sugarmakers also worry that packaging changes might confuse customers who are accustomed to a certain look. Jarvis said she has put a disclaimer on the farm’s website, saying that products might not arrive in the same packaging as pictured.
Some customers have questioned the origin of syrup in generic jugs. Luce said Sugarbush still has a few of its old jugs in less popular sizes, in addition to jugs with generic “pure Vermont maple syrup” labels.
“They say, ‘Oh, did you really make all this syrup, or did you buy it from somebody else?’” she said. “We can send them to our sugarhouse and show them where we make it, and hopefully we convince them.”
Long lead times for labeled jugs stem from a variety of factors, said Owen Manahan, packaging sales manager at Dominion & Grimm in St. Albans, an equipment manufacturer and packaging supplier for sugarmakers.
“Throughout the last year during the pandemic, there was an increase in syrup consumption as a whole,” Manahan said. “The market grew, but how the product went to market changed.”
With more people ordering syrup online instead of eating it at restaurants or buying it from trade shows and specialty stores, the industry’s packaging needs shifted, Manahan said. That meant more plastic jugs and commodity glass bottles, he said, and producers had trouble keeping up with demand at first.
Manahan also attributed the delays to labor shortages and shortages in raw materials like resin.
“I think it’s the same thing that every other industry has been struggling through, but it’s just apparent in the jug world because there’s so few people that produce them that it really has a trickle-down effect to every sugarmaker,” he said.
Hillside Plastics, a Turners Falls, Mass., company that manufactures many of the plastic maple syrup jugs, is dealing with significant labor shortages, according to shipping supervisor Bob Waite.
The manufacturer’s decorating department, where blank jugs are printed with logos, is down at least 12 people, he said.
“Once they’re gone, it’s hard to get anybody back,” Waite said. “We’ve had three open houses trying to get people in here, and I think we had one person show up for one of them.”
Supply chain issues have been top of mind for many consumers throughout the pandemic — what with toilet paper shortages and the current rental car crisis — but they have been just as worrisome for business owners.
Many of Vermont’s small breweries have faced aluminum can shortages, according to Michael Czok, owner of Bent Hill Brewery in Braintree. Last winter, Czok’s shipments were cut by nearly 75%, then reduced to a single pallet per month, and they still have not returned to normal levels, he said.
“I know for a fact that the smaller breweries have been hit the most by this because we just don’t have the buying power that the larger facilities have,” Czok said.
Caledonia Spirits, the Montpellier distillery known for Bar Hill Gin, has not faced long lead times from its glass supplier, said Harrison Kahn, vice president of marketing. It has also avoided problems in obtaining the company’s most critical ingredient, raw honey. He said the company has dealt with fluctuations by making commitments to nearby apiaries.
“We can invest, essentially, alongside them,” Kahn said.
A state grant helped Bent Hill weather can cutbacks and the period when its taproom was closed, Czok said.
“We definitely wouldn’t have made it through without that,” he said.
For sugarmakers, there is still no light at the end of the tunnel. Lemay is also dealing with shortages and subsequent price increases for other supplies, such as glass jars and the plastic boxes she uses for maple candy. She said she will have to raise prices because her margins will not cover the added expense.
She also worries that unlabeled jugs will run out as more sugarmakers turn to them. Even so, she is adamantly against stockpiling.
“I don’t want to participate in that kind of toilet-paper-hoarding mentality,” she said. “I’m just going to do the best I can and hope that this is temporary, and if it isn’t, I’ll have to come up with a more streamlined approach than manually putting labels on hundreds of jugs.”
