A summer of selling MapleWorxz™ Organic maple syrup at one of the region’s largest Farmers Market (Port Austin Farmers Marker) allowed us to field many questions about making maple syrup, grading, glass versus plastic and many more. The question that always made us a bit nervous is when the potential customer or customer would ask us about price. What made us nervous was that the market often had other maple syrup sellers (nonorganic) and although we were often spaced far apart, the customer most often had already completed their pricing homework throughout the market and knew what the other maple syrup vendors were charging.  The difference ranged $20.00-$30.00 more than our $50.00 a gallon price as an example. It was the question that followed that made us nervous and that was, “why are all your prices lower than the others especially since you are organic”?

Since the answer that we would like to provide would most likely more than the customer would like to hear, the short answer was basically three reasons and listed as follows:

1. We are comfortable with our pricing and our objective is to provide a price point that isn’t prohibitive to families wanting to try real maple syrup and move away from store bought substitutes.
2. Our maple syrup is organic certified requiring yearly inspections and strict process control from tree to bottle ensuring the best quality and taste.
3. Our syrup making methods are traditional which means we use wood to fire our evaporator hearth and do not use Reverse Osmosis to remove water from our sap before we evaporate. We further believe this reverse osmosis exclusion contributes to the best maple taste and received the Michigan Maple Syrup Association’s best Amber syrup and best of show awards in 2020. In addition, many of our customers tell us that they think our maple syrup has the best taste.

With all that said, what is a fair price for Maple Syrup? According to the July issue of Maple News, a publication that maple syrup makers receive and often refer to their articles, included the 2021 maple syrup crop report citing pricing and other statistics of the seven top maple syrup producing states. Relating to maple syrup pricing, Michigan’s average price per gallon was cited for 2020 as $48.60 which was the same as 2019. Using the report data as a quick comparison of our MapleWorxz™ prices we provided a list with our price listed first and the Michigan average price second starting with gallons:

Our conclusion from this comparative data is that we are fairly priced in the maple syrup market however an argument could be made that we may be underpriced as our maple syrup is organically certified and the reports data is related to non-organic certified producers.

With the Michigan ranked as the sixth largest producer at 150.000 gallons in 2021, the six states listed from largest to smallest maple producers are: Vermont 1,540,000, New York 647,000 Maine 495,000 Wisconsin 300,000, Pennsylvania 165,000, Michigan 150,000, and New Hampshire 127,000 gallons.