Maple syrup products are seen in a market in Montreal on Aug. 23.ANDREJ IVANOV/AFP/Getty Images
Peter Kuitenbrouwer is a registered professional forester who teaches in the Master of Forest Conservation at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada’s Sweetest Obsession.
A few months ago on a Sunday morning, Gaétan Pouliot performed a ritual common among many families across Canada, including ours: He made crêpes (we usually eat pancakes and waffles), and doused them in maple syrup. At least, the label on the can from which he poured the liquid read, “pure maple syrup.”
But something tasted wrong. Mr. Pouliot, who had bought the syrup at a Montreal supermarket, just happens to be a journalist at Enquête, the flagship investigative television show on Radio-Canada. The team brought five syrup cans bought at different supermarkets, but all with the sticker of one producer, to a maple syrup testing lab, and visited the unsuspecting syrup packager in St. Chrystostome, south of Montreal, with hidden cameras. Their report revealed that oceans of “maple syrup” sold for around $5 a half-litre at all Quebec’s big supermarket chains was in fact at best half syrup, the other half being cane sugar. They titled their TV story Sirop de Poteau, the derisive Quebec term for table syrup, or literally, the syrup you would make if you tapped a fence post.
This month, a Vancouver-based law firm has asked court permission to certify a class action naming the syrup packager, Steve Bourdeau, and Quebec retailers including Loblaws, Sobeys and Metro, for allegedly selling something as maple syrup that is not the real thing. Courts have yet to rule on any of this. (Confronted by the Enquête reporters about test results that found 50-per-cent cane sugar in the syrup he canned, Mr. Bourdeau speculated that perhaps one of his suppliers in Ontario or New Brunswick sold him adulterated syrup. I have been unable to get ahold of Mr. Bourdeau for comment).
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How did we get here? Quebec is after all the beating heart of the world’s maple syrup industry. A powerful cartel of maple syrup farmers, the Producteurs et Productrices Acéricoles du Québec, run out of the top floor of a kind of secular agricultural cathedral in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil, sets the price of syrup, tells Quebec farmers how much syrup they may produce, and owns three high-security warehouses – the grandly named Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve – that between them can stockpile the equivalent of 53 Olympic-size swimming pools of the liquid gold.
The Centre ACER, a Quebec maple syrup research institute, maintains a team of testers in its inspection division, who from March through September taste, and run tests on, samples from millions of litres of maple syrup, to classify it, and also to make sure it is, in fact, maple syrup.
This infrastructure and control has helped propel Quebec to global supremacy, as source of more than two-thirds of the global maple syrup supply; Statistics Canada suggests that maple syrup production has more than doubled over the past 15 years.
But now we have massive sales of adulterated syrup in, of all places, Quebec. Aren’t Quebeckers supposed to know what maple syrup tastes like? How was this subterfuge possible? One wonders: Is any of our syrup pure?
We have been here before, as I describe in my history book, Maple Syrup. At a 1916 meeting of maple syrup producers in west Quebec, John H. Grimm, maker of the famed Grimm maple syrup evaporators, praised the Inland Revenue Department in Ottawa for punishing grocers under the Adulteration Act, which read in part, “No person shall manufacture for sale, keep for sale, offer or expose for sale, or sell, any article of food resembling or being an imitation of maple sugar or maple syrup or which is composed partly of maple sugar or maple syrup, and which is not pure maple sugar or pure maple syrup.”
Peter Kuitenbrouwer: Breaking Bad, with maple syrup
The current fake syrup scandal stems to a loophole in the Quebec syrup marketing framework. Each spring, most maple syrup leaves industrial sugar shacks in Quebec in 200-litre drums, about the size of a barrel of oil, and gets tested either at bottling companies or at the federation warehouses that stockpile excess syrup. But the producers’ federation permits syrup farmers to also can their own syrup, which they may sell directly to supermarkets or at the roadside, with a cut of sales paid to the federation. This accounts for about 10 per cent of Quebec syrup.
That syrup never gets systematically tested, although the Quebec syrup federation told me that it directs ACER to sample in a random way the maple syrup sold on the roadside or in grocery stores, and report any violations to the competent authorities.
This is the system that fell apart.
Making maple syrup is hard work, as the legions of Canadians who, often through grade schools, have made pilgrimages to a local sugar shack in spring can tell you: One must boil down 40 litres of the sap that drips slowly from the sugar maple tree, to get a litre of syrup. That’s why the stuff is pricey! So when one spring pyramidical stacks of cans of syrup appeared in grocery aisles for $5 a can, about half the usual price, across Quebec, everyone buys it and nobody blinks an eye? And where was the random taste-testing crew, supposedly guided by the high priests of Quebec’s maple syrup orthodoxy? They didn’t notice the flood of bargain-basement syrup?
One problem may be that Canadians (gasp!) and even Quebeckers (bigger gasp!) are forgetting what real maple syrup tastes like. The maple syrup that we make on my little Ontario farm by collecting sap with buckets hanging from metal spiles tapped into maple trees, and then boiling the sap for days over a wood fire, is dark, smoky and flavourful. But these days in big sugar bushes, vacuum pumps suck sap through plastic tubes to vats where other pumps then force the sap through membranes to take out most of the water, before the sap goes into high-efficiency evaporators fired usually by stove oil or electricity, producing a lovely syrup, sure, but a lighter syrup that, purists insist, lacks that caramelly, slightly smoky, mysterious, zesty sweet taste that reminds us of youth, wilderness and home.
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At its annual meeting this May in Lévis, south of Quebec City, the syrup federation faced syrup farmers furious with the syrup subterfuge. A federation lawyer told them that the federation had taken custody of 46 totes (usually holding 1,000 litres each), 142 barrels (each holding about 200 litres) and was still trying to round up about 50 shipping pallets of cans of “maple syrup” from the suspect producer, which the lawyer described as “radioactive.”
We may not need a Royal Commission, but something tastes very sour in the heart of maple syrup country right now, leaving consumers across Canada with diminished confidence in our national condiment.
The newspaper La Presse this spring quoted Joël Vaudeville, a spokesperson for the Quebec syrup federation, suggesting to consumers to “take advantage of the next few weeks to fill up [with maple syrup] directly from the producer. This direct connection ensures quality.”
That’s easy if you live a convenient drive from a sugar bush. Others across Canada would prefer that the cartel of farmers, who maintain a rigid control over the market in the sweetener that comes from the tree represented on our flag, along with our governments, do a better job to make sure that the maple syrup we buy in a can or bottle tastes good, and is the real thing.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Gaétan Pouliot’s first name.