There is nothing quite like a breakfast of pancakes or waffles with syrup on top.
Maple syrup can turn an ordinary pancake into something that is far from ordinary.
Maple Syrup is really a treat, and even if you don’t use a lot of it, you will likely notice the difference in your grocery bill when you purchase it.
Maple Syrup is very expensive, and the pricing seems to continue to go up almost every year.
Unfortunately, the reasons behind maple syrup being so expensive are many.
We have gathered some valuable information to help you understand why this pricing is so high and if there is anything that you can do about it.
Why Is Maple Syrup So Expensive? (Top 10 Reasons)
1. Tastes Great
Maple syrup has a great taste to it.
If you are someone who is annoyed with dry or bland food, putting maple syrup on your food can make a big difference.
In addition to maple syrup tasting great, it is also available in some different flavors.
Those who really know what they are talking about can tell which part of the country a maple syrup came from just from the taste of it.
Some people get so set on a type of maple syrup that they will only purchase from one manufacturer.
Maple syrup has become so popular, and people have started treating it like a delicacy, and that has certainly increased the price.
Those who are serious about maple syrup will tell you that the imitation products are not going to even come close to replacing the flavor or the texture of true maple syrup.
Even if you are a bit of a picky eater, chances are you will enjoy the taste of pure maple syrup.
There is something about the way that this product came directly from nature and can then transform the way a meal tastes.
As long as maple syrup tastes as good as it does, chances are you are not going to see the price go down anytime soon.
2. Can Be Used For A Variety Of Meals
If you thought that maple syrup is only used for pancakes and waffles, think again.
As years have gone on, chefs have become more and more creative with their use of different ingredients.
Maple syrup can be used for a variety of things, and if you look at recipes, you will notice that the list of recipes calling for maple syrup is only growing.
The most common use remains breakfast food, but here are some other ways that you may see maple syrup used in recipes.
Many times, people will use maple syrup as part of a marinade when working with meat.
It seems that pork pairs well with maple syrup, but you can use it with chicken and certain seafood as well.
Because of its sweet taste, it is also quite common to see maple syrup used as an ingredient in cakes and desserts, especially when it comes to a glaze on food.
In addition, maple syrup can help vegetables taste just a bit better as well.
Many root vegetables pair quite well with maple syrup, including sweet potatoes and butternut squash.
Some people use maple syrup when cooking bacon to give it more of a candied taste to use as a topping on food like salads or even some desserts.
The number of uses for maple syrup is almost endless if you are a creative chef.
Since maple syrup is relatively easy to work with, it only becomes more apparent why people would want to put it on their food.
Of course, with the increased demand and the fact that it is so useful, you will see an increase in the price.
The overall cost of maple syrup goes up because there are so many uses for it, and it is in such high demand.
Until something works as a good replacement, you probably won’t see the pricing change all that much.
3. Health Benefits
You have probably always assumed that maple syrup is a treat and should be eaten in moderation.
As with most foods containing sugar, it is a smart idea to eat maple syrup in moderation.
However, there are some health benefits of maple syrup that most people are unaware of.
To start, maple syrup contains many antioxidants.
This is something that can help you feel better and fight off common colds and illnesses.
Many times, foods that come directly from nature are going to be higher in antioxidants.
In addition, maple syrup can help to fight inflammatory diseases.
If you know anything about health and inflammatory disease, you know that inflammation is a major cause of health issues in people.
The more you can do to keep inflammation down, the better you will feel in general.
Maple syrup also has a very low glycemic index score.
Foods with a low glycemic index tend to give us less of the bad sugar that will cause weight gain and highs and lows in our blood glucose throughout the day.
This, of course, is true only if the maple syrup you are consuming is pure.
Artificial or imitation products do not have the same health benefits and should not be considered a health food when used in certain meals or recipes.
Many people also feel as though maple syrup helps them with their digestive issues.
The list of health benefits for maple syrup is going to be quite extensive.
This does not mean that you need to incorporate this into your diet daily.
It’s simply a reason to consider maple syrup over other artificial sweeteners.
As soon as something takes on the role of being healthier, the price almost immediately goes up.
There is no question that it is cheaper to be unhealthy than healthy, and it really is a problem in the world of food pricing in America.
4. Could Be Better Than Traditional Sugars And Sweeteners
There are lots of ways that we use sugar to change the flavor of our food.
Have you ever seen someone take a bowl of fruit and sprinkle sugar all over it?
Chances are, someone in your life has an unhealthy relationship with sugar and sweets.
It’s easy to let this happen with all of the options for sugary products on the market.
However, one of the ways to help avoid this issue is to use products like maple syrup that are at least a little better for you than artificial sweeteners.
Some artificial sweeteners that you will want to stay away from include things like aspartame or sucralose.
These are not made from natural products, and our bodies have a hard time knowing how to process these foods.
Instead, it makes sense to use foods like syrup or honey to replace the taste that these products give you.
Of course, with the manufacturing and science that goes into artificial sweeteners, they are usually calorie-free, but that is where their benefits stop.
These sweeteners can cause other issues both physically and mentally if they are used in excess.
If you are working on getting your body away from these types of sugars, then maple syrup may be able to help you do it.
You will notice that once you make the switch, your cravings for sugar will decrease, and you will feel fuller after your meals.
In addition, you will likely feel better both physically and mentally.
Of course, this is all positive, except that it causes an increase in the price of maple syrup.
Since people know that this is a healthier and smarter ingredient in the diet, the pricing will increase quite a bit.
5. Long And Expensive Process
The process of making maple syrup is long and expensive.
The time it takes and the work that has to go into making maple syrup is a major reason it is so expensive.
This process involves things like tapping into trees and letting the syrup run out of the trees.
The syrup needs to be collected, but at this point, it is not considered to be a finished product.
Once the syrup is collected, it has to go through a process that requires boiling the sap.
When the sap is first collected, it will not be edible the way that you are used to eating maple syrup.
Once it is heated over an open fire, usually right around the boiling point of water, it starts to turn into a syrupy product.
You have to imagine what it takes to collect sticky sap and then deal with it as it boils and then collect it into smaller containers for resale.
If you have ever gotten a bit of maple syrup on your clothes or hands, you know that this is not an easy product to deal with.
In addition, if you have done yard work and noticed sap on your maple trees, you know how difficult sap is to work with.
Unfortunately, when making maple syrup, you are not talking about something quite as simple as planting a few seeds and getting a product that can be sold.
The process is much more involved than this and will require so many hours of labor to get it right.
Because of this, there are just not as many companies that will take on the process, and the overall volume of maple syrup available on the market is not relatively as high as you would expect.
Anytime a product is difficult or time consuming to make, we will see higher costs associated with the cost to produce.
As much as you want to get a deal on maple syrup, the farmer producing it needs to make money as well.
6. Sugaring Season
The season for collecting sap from maple trees does not last all year.
Farmers of maple syrup cannot decide that they are going to work on trees continually throughout the entire year.
There is a specific sugaring season depending on the climate where the sap is being collected.
It is essential that all the sap is collected during this time.
The fact that there is a short window for this makes the job of a maple syrup producer much more difficult.
The idea is that, during certain times of the year, the collection and production are going to be extremely busy, meaning more employees and more man-hours.
However, during other times of the year, the business could be quite slow.
This makes it very difficult to have the proper employees in place and to budget the right way.
This is why you will notice many of the maple syrup products are from small companies that charge a premium for their products.
Ensuring that they are able to manage and operate the business is sometimes too much to make it a large-scale business.
7. Volume It Takes To Make One Gallon
One of the biggest issues in the pricing of maple syrup is the volume that it takes to produce a gallon of this sweet substance.
If you see the buckets of sap that are pulled from an ample tree, you may assume that the finished product will closely match.
This is not the case.
In order to produce maple syrup, you will be shocked by the amount of sap that it takes.
To make one half-gallon of syrup, you will need about 15 to 20 gallons of sap.
Have you ever considered what it might be like to collect, haul away, and then boil down 20 gallons of sap?
The process is not just time consuming, but it is also very physically demanding.
Once you take all of this sap and work it down into the half-gallon of syrup, it really does make sense that the cost of maple syrup is so higher.
If a farmer were to charge $3.00 for this, how could they ever pay for their land, the trees’ health, the equipment, the labor, the packaging, etc.?
It would not be possible.
If you are a person who goes through a lot of maple syrup, consider also how many trees it takes to produce the amount of syrup that you are eating in a year.
8. Size Of Forest Needed To Produce Maple Syrup
As we mentioned, it takes 20 to 30 gallons of sap to make just one half-gallon of maple syrup.
The half-gallon of maple syrup is barely enough to get a family through a year of hearty breakfasts.
This means that, in order to make enough maple syrup to feed all of those who are interested, the number of trees necessary is astronomical.
Think about the size of the fields that maple syrup producers are going to need to properly fulfill the demand.
This is going to require thousands of acres of land, and the trees themselves need to be mature to produce enough sap.
Essentially, if you are thinking of going into the syrup business, there are lots of costs and overhead involved with the land that you must own.
In addition, maple syrup producers need to pay attention to the trees and ensure they stay free of diseases.
If one disease comes in and decreases the amount of sap in the tree, the overall crop could be destroyed for that year.
There are many variables, too, when it comes to the weather.
The weather will impact the amount of sap and exactly when the sugaring season will be.
The business just has so many complicated variables that you will end up quickly realizing why maple syrup is so expensive.
This is not a small-scale operation that you will be able to start just because you have a fundamental interest in maple syrup.
9. Supply And Demand
With all of the benefits that we explained about maple syrup, which do you think is higher: the supply or the demand?
If you guessed demand, you are correct.
The demand for maple syrup is high because of all the fantastic benefits of the product.
This, of course, means that supply needs to try and keep up, but it has a very hard time doing so.
As much as the producers of syrup try to speed it up, the process is just so time-consuming, and it takes so much time to get it all done.
Until the supply of maple syrup increases and it becomes easier to make, we are probably not going to see a change in the overall pricing.
In addition, with more awareness of the health benefits of the more naturally produced sugars, the demand for maple syrup continues to increase.
Each year, you may have seen maple syrup pricing go up just a bit, and that is a sign of the times and of the markets.
Things are getting more expensive, especially food products, and maple syrup is certainly no exception.
The good news is that, if you like maple syrup and you understand the benefits, you will quickly see that the extra cost is well worth it.
10. Labor Costs
Labor costs for a food like maple syrup are quite high.
As we mentioned, the sap that is removed from the trees is quite heavy, and it is sticky and difficult to work with.
This, of course, leads to issues with the employees you have working on the farm.
Employees need to be physically able to handle the heavy work, and they need to be prepared to spend a lot of time outside as well.
Finding valuable employees is only part of the problem.
The employer must also ensure that the employees are available to work overtime for most of the sugaring season, which only makes it more challenging to find the right crew.
Labor costs are incorporated into almost everything we purchase in our lives.
When you purchase maple syrup, a large part of the high pricing has to do with labor costs.
Of course, things have been done within the industry to at least partially automate the process, but we still need people to make maple syrup, and until that changes, you can expect higher pricing.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you can now see that maple syrup is expensive for many reasons.
When you see a small container of maple syrup priced for $20, you can now understand why this is.
If you enjoy maple syrup, you will know that the pricing is justified when you are purchasing an excellent maple syrup.
The time spent producing the syrup and getting it to your kitchen table was lengthy and exhaustive.
If you think about what it would take you to make your own maple syrup, chances are you will have a better time justifying the price that you have paid for your syrup.
In the end, the product is a unique one, and it certainly helps to understand why it is so expensive.
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