Canada's maple syrup reserve hits 16-year low | Hacker News Reader

Canada's maple syrup reserve hits 16-year low

bbc.com

73 pointsbookofjoe77 comments

The thing is the production was already artificially limited by the government. So as the article says one way to increase production is just to allow for additional production.

I was going to comment that - supply is already “managed”.

I always thought the reserve was odd, but it's for buyers not producers. 2019 and 2020 where record years and now their down to 6.9 million out of 133 million lb, with that kind of variability it seems like a good idea.

The reserve buys from producers though, right? If the reserve buys from producers during highly productive years, that prevents the price of syrup from falling too much. It seems to serve both producers and buyers.

Yes, it should work as a buffer against shocks.

which allows places like mcdonalds to use it as the price and supply is stable

It's a cartel. 95% of Canada's syrup comes from members of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers. They manage the reserve, govern quality standards, and set the price. They also set strict quotas.

https://ppaq.ca/en/our-organization/operation-and-regulation...

Now I'm imagining submarines full of illicit maple syrup

You joke, but maple syrup smuggling is a thing . . . https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35028380

No, it doesn't. Maple syrup is a minor luxury, easily substituted by other things like jam or honey. Consumers are better off with lower average syrup prices, not propped up by a government cartel, even if those prices have somewhat higher variance: when the price is high, people just substitute away and eat less maple syrup, no big deal. (It's not a necessity like air or water or housing.) If the variance is a big deal for various commercial players like IHOP, then they can just deal with producers directly or someone can set up a futures market, like everything else.

> Maple syrup is a minor luxury, easily substituted by other things like jam or honey.

Speaking as a Canadian, I suppose this is maybe technically true from an economic standpoint, but…we don’t even accept table syrup as a substitute, much less honey or jam.

(and I’ll bet IHOP serves table, not maple, syrup…)

Correct, except in Vermont.

As gwern said, maple syrup is a minor luxury. My household grew up with Aunt Jemima because the extra expense could not be justified. People here saying maple syrup cannot be substituted sound as pompous as saying they only drink XXO Cognac because regular brandy just won't do.

Your analogy is flawed. Maple syrup is not to jam or honey as XXO Cognac is to regular brandy.

A better analogy is that maple syrup is to jam or honey as brandy is to beer.

Yeah — they have the same sort of fundamental purpose but if your recipe or drink calls for wine you probably don’t want to substitute beer or vice versa.

According to one random source online, a typical serving of syrup would be about 15mL per pancake, so perhaps 50mL for an average breakfast serving of three pancakes for an adult.

My local grocery store sells maple syrup for $1.90/100mL and table syrup for $0.60/100mL. This means that a serving of maple syrup would cost $0.95 and table syrup would cost $0.30, or a difference of $0.65 per person per meal.

As 'luxuries' go, we're not talking about large amounts of money here, even for a low income family, to afford. I grew up in a low income family, and we still used actual maple syrup growing up because the difference in quality is worth it.

I mean, by your own numbers, maple syrup is more than 3 times the price of its competitor. I would also imagine the type of syrup is not high on the priority list when comparison shopping.

For what it's worth, my SO grew up in Texas and absolutely prefers the taste & consistency of table syrup over maple syrup for our use cases (pancakes & waffles). I suppose it's what he grew up with and that's what "syrup" is supposed to taste like to him.

My point is that the quantities that are consumed per serving are small and so it's the absolute costs that are more important than the relative difference.

Sure, but I think you have to consider how most people shop: if they see the bottle of maple syrup as 3 times the cost of its competitor, that's the comparison they see, especially if they have no strong emotional connection to maple syrup itself. Could they make the stretch if they wanted to? I'm sure they could, but I imagine there's a hundred other competing groceries that win out when the primary caretaker is grocery shopping. Should they opt for the name brand cereal or the store brand? Detergent? Juice? I don't think most of those grocery item comparisons are as stark as a three-fold difference, so I can appreciate that maple syrup may not make the cut for many people - even if the difference is not all that much in dollar terms.

An extra $0.50 per meal (less than what you are saying and not just for a topping) equates to an extra $500/year per person. Either you did not grow up as low income as you think you did or your family made sacrifices to keep maple syrup on the table. I knew many families that could not afford a new Xbox for their kids. You are literally saying that an Xbox per person per year is not a large amount of money for a low income family. I don't think we'll agree on that.

In order to make that argument you have to assume that someone eats pancakes every day. I assure you we did not.

$500 per person per year divided by $0.50 per meal equals 1000 meals per year, which is almost every meal all year. Most people only eat pancakes for breakfast, and not anywhere near every day. What about a moderate rate like 2 maple syrup meals per week: then it's only $26 per person per year.

There's a lot more happiness from going to 1.50$/meal from 1$/meal at every meal across an entire year than buying an XBox at the end of the year and not being able to afford games. Poor people know what it's like to have little money for food, that first jump is often a very high priority.

Where exactly peoples breaking points are varies, but you can be quite poor and still have some wiggle room. 1.50/meal vs buying used clothes is easy etc.

So sure it might be real maple syrup on the cheapest pancakes it's possible to make, but it's well worth it.

It can be somewhat substituted by “regular” (aka caramel) syrup although the taste of that is darker and has less depth due to the missing maple flavor.

Honey and especially jam are ridiculous examples for substitutes.

It might be true for non-Canadian consumers of syrup. From my brief search, it looks like perhaps 70% of Canadian maple syrup is exported, so the tastes of non-Canadian consumers is quite important in this context.

As a New Englander, I would agree that jam is not a substitute for maple syrup, but it’s a valid choice if you’re feeling a fruity vibe.

Maple syrup is not easily substituted by anything. Table syrup doesn't taste right, and the things you list cover completely different niches.

Those things are nothing like maple syrup. Can you imagine stirring a spoonful of jam into a coffee? Blech.

People stir syrup into coffee? In the US the only context in which I see people consume maple syrup is as a condiment for pancakes/waffles, and even in those situations I see many people deliberately avoid maple syrup and instead reach for table syrup (preferred taste & consistency).

It is in fact amazing in coffee.

1/2 maple syrup 1/2 whiskey - heated … is pretty good too :)

People responding and downvoting don't understand "substitute != same". For people downvoting this comment, go look at the canonical examples of substitutes. Margarine and butter. McDonald's and Burger King. These are all flamewar worthy different but considered substitutes nonetheless. In fact, it goes much further than this. A consumer craving chocolate might be willing to substitute ice cream if the price is too high. In this case, maple syrup and pancakes can very much be substituted with Canadian bacon and eggs. The whole point of microeconomics is to say that the market bearing price is dictated by utility curves and you can always ask consumers "would you rather have a barrel of maple syrup or a trip around the world" and that puts a fundamental cap on prices.

No, people downvoting and responding understand the true value of maple syrup and will not be insulted by someone who clearly was never cold to the bone after skiing and made some maple candy on snow /sarcastic - ish

I've been cold to the bone after skiing and I've made maple candy on snow on multiple occasions, but I'll confess, I've never done those consecutively. (Mostly because it would never have occurred to me to drag along a bottle of maple syrup on a ski trip.)

I would like to register my offence

This reminded me of The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, Over the course of several months between 2011 and 2012, the contents of 9,571 barrels, valued at C$18.7M, were stolen in a suspected insider job from a FPAQ facility in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, Quebec.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/great-cana...

This was covered in an episode in a Netflix series (Dirty Money maybe?) and was fascinating. And amusing of course!

An Illustrated Account of the Great Maple Syrup Heist - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304095051/http://modernfarm... (the original is now a mess of broken image links)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367590 (140 points by DrScump on Oct 11, 2015 | 61 comments )

Was gonna say, I wonder whatever happened to the chance they were going to make an actual movie about that, but it ended up maybe down the line it's just going to be a comedy show.

https://deadline.com/2022/04/great-canadian-maple-syrup-heis...

Related Canadian source:

Canada's maple syrup reserve almost empty as sap season at risk of becoming another casualty of the winter that wasn't

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/canadas-maple-syrup-reserve...

weird.. I was at a sugar shack west of montreal a few weeks ago and he said this year was one of the longest and most productive in some time.

It is entirely possible that for that particular sugar shack they had an unusually long and productive season with it still being an unusually short and unproductive season in general.

The timing was off this year with the unusually mild winter, the sap started to run weeks earlier than usual. Its entirely possible that a small time sugar shack would be on the ball and tap their trees early where as a corporate producer might miss the peak.

Corporate entities, which followed the calendar instead of listening to the trees probably didn't do well this reason

Multiple people on Reddit said the same thing, that this year was one of the best for small time shops.

I think this article is part FOMO, part "oh no feel bad for us" by big companies.

> part "oh no feel bad for us" by big companies.

It's about the reserves, so it's literally just a small cartel consisting of a few big companies that limit the ability of smaller producers to compete, so yeah.

The warm weather threatened to cut things short, but then it got cold again and it looks like this season will be good after all.

Sustained warmer temps = longer sap season, makes sense !

This week in the news literally was reporting a record season. Don't know about ROC but QC has been freezing/thawing for weeks, which is great for the production.

I have tapped my own trees and doubt this is due to climate change. In fact more warm days would probably increase production. The days when you get the best and most sap is when there is a cold night (sub freezing) followed by a warm day. Warming would push this earlier in the season but it would still happen. The only way production would be halted or impacted significantly would be if we stopped having sub freezing nights the entire winter. Sap after the trees bud for the spring is less desirable as it has a stronger flavor.

Olive Oil Chocolate and now maple syrup.

Feels like every niche product is having some random supply "issue" just to sock it to consumers.

Waiting for the cereral industry to blame the Key Bridge collapse for a rise in Captain Crunch prices.

So this happened already in 2008 and no major systemic issue driving this. So why do we have this article?

It's not like it is the lowest in 100 years or something.

What a load of crap.

We tapped our trees a couple of weeks early this year and had just about normal production levels. It just seems to have stopped a couple weeks earlier than usual because of a cold spell and an awful lot of cloud cover but there's still a couple weeks left before the peepers come out and we pull all the spiles.

Then again where I live we have no government regulation of the syrup industry. You can sell everything you can produce. Then again, I'm not in Quebec and Quebec is not the same as Canada.

For a remote outsider - is the divide between quebec and rest of canada not just a language one?

The short answer is no, it is much more than that!

The long answer involves several hundreds of years of history…

It is significantly more than that. One major example: quebec has a separate legal system for civil matters, based on french civil law. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_law)

(Brit here) While working on a contract in Ottowa, I asked about Quebec which was just next door. My hosts explained that Canada and Quebec is like Britain would be if you put Scotland in the middle between Southern and Northern England.

Their traffic lights are sideways and have different shapes as well as colours too.

Quebec's maple syrup is indeed controlled by a cartel and the traditional supply/demand rules are meaningless, it's just market manipulation. Same with cow milk. But both BC and Ontario operate the same way, so I'm not sure why you're implying that quebec is the outlier here, seems like wherever you live might be...

I'm a maple syrup producer in Ontario and I can state unequivocally there is no marketing board or supply-side economics for maple products here. You make it, you sell it, people buy it.

Do maple trees even grow in BC? I'm not aware of any syrup industry of any size there.

> What a load of crap.

> We tapped our trees ... and had just about normal production levels.

That makes me wonder if the cartel is priming the pump for a price increase. Perhaps there will be another "great maple syrup heist" resulting in a shortage and skyrocketing price.

Talk about useless government nonsense. If we need a strategic reserve for Maple Syrup, then why not strategic reserves for everything else? Why not one for sugar, playstations, shoes, jockstrap itch cream, etc. I'd rather go without my breakfast syrup than suffer jock itch with no remedy ... right?

There is some special interest at play here. Nonsensical.

Damn it Canada, you had one job - protect the maple syrup!

Maple Syrup reserve?

I can't believe there's a maple syrup reserve hehe

Quick, fetch my smelling salts. I feel faint.

Artificial scarcity to drive prices higher?

It's less artificial scarcity than production management to ensure consistent high prices. Lost of Canadian agricultural sectors have quotas to keep prices high to ensure domestic supply and are a de facto subsidy to farmers. Dairy, poultry, maple syrup. Plus import controls on these same products.

The system is divisive but it does what it was intended to do - keep Canadian farmers in business by charging domestic consumers more.

If jokes are allowed on HN still…this is Canada’s version of the U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve right?

It's not a joke. This is a strategic reserve for them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Maple_Syrup_Producers...

Looks like it's stored as barrels: https://ppaq.ca/en/sale-purchase-maple-syrup/worlds-only-res...

(I was kind of hoping it'd be a giant pool of maple syrup)

I think he was referring to his own comment.

It does seem like a funny thing to do but not when you think about it. Its a commodity. It has a price. Canada controls much of the market. It lasts a long time. Why wouldn’t they have a reserve?

It also seems very rich 21st century to not see immediate value in storing large quantities of food. Surplus is something we take for granted.

Kind of. It's not a national security strategic reserve but rather an economic one. It helps ensure a stable supply so that prices don't skyrocket, particularly as the annual harvest of maple syrup is very hard to predict: it depends heavily on freeze/thaw patterns in the spring.

The argument, I think, is that if prices are unreliable, customers are turned off from the product and develop new habits that exclude maple syrup. Without it, maple syrup prices would have been ridiculous these past couple years.

It's also how we avoid having to annex Vermont.

It also acts as a buyer when prices are very low (gotta fill the reserve somehow) which props up prices at oversupply times, keeping the industry stable.

Nah. It's more like their version of the US strategic cheese reserve.

(and yes, that's a thing)

https://www.farmlinkproject.org/stories-and-features/cheese-...

There's also the Swiss coffee reserve - https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/has-beans_why-is-switz...

> The Swiss government has delayed a decision to scrap the nation’s 15,000-tonne strategic coffee bean reserve after the proposal prompted public and industry jitters. Here’s what you need to know about the issue and why it's been brewing for months.

... though, that's more a strategic reserve.

> Self-reliance is an integral part of Swiss history and economic policy, and the country stocks food, medicines and oil in large quantities to cope with possible shortages. The three-month coffee reserve aims to insulate the land-locked nation from supply disruptions, historically driven by concerns about global conflict although now facing the more immediate threat of global warming and low water levels on the River Rhine shipping route.

I've actually been in the underground where the cheese cave is, though I didn't actually see any cheese.

They took us outside (or maybe, inside?) of the finished area and got to experience the "true darkness" inside.

Like, you know that you can turn around and go right back around, but honestly, it is so dark in there that it makes your heart race.

It's also like 50-something degrees in there year-round. Pretty cozy. ;)

Fairly similar, although the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is more about keeping the United States economy stable in the midst of global supply disruptions (particularly discouraging foreign nations who might like to pressure the United States with embargoes), while the FPAQ maple syrup reserve is more about keeping the maple syrup industry financially stable from year to year.

Americans will soon be encouraged to switch to electric pancakes.

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