How do maple syrup brands compete?

One of the true joys of life is real maple syrup. Most people think of it as a topping for pancakes and waffles, but it has cooking uses as well. It can add flavor to a variety of baked goods. Beyond that maple syrup is used in some BBQ sauces. Wherever your imagination takes you, really.

Maple syrup is well, maple syrup. A one ingredient product. It is a generic item, sourced from the sap of maple trees which is distilled down to a syrup. There are two grades (dark and amber) at retail. I discuss the grades below. So how do brands compete with each other?

At my local Plum Market five brands duke it out across different package sizes. There are a ton of maple syrup SKUs. Fourteen that were just maple syrup, not counting maple blends and the other breakfast syrups. That’s more than ketchup. I am fascinated by the pricing differential and label claims between brands. No one advertises maple syrup. The only competitive factors are brand name, label design and on-package claims.

The cheapest brand is Field Day, a brand umbrella for a line of lower-cost organic products. The label is consistent with Field Day branding across products, featuring the logo and the USDA organic and Non-GMO seals. The graphic design features two maple leaves. There is also a label claim of 100% Goodness. I think this is supposed to get at the idea that maple syrup is not a refined sweetener, like sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

Where Field Day is at $1.00 per ounce in the 8 oz. bottle, Doodles is $1.12 per ounce ($8.99). What do you get for your extra dollar? Basically, you are buying sourcing from a Michigan family farm. I read research that consumers like to buy maple syrup from small farmers, and this label sells that proposition. Since I am in Michigan, this is a local farm.

The graphic design is plain text in a variety of fonts (five!) with a small maple leaf. The interesting thing is that Doodle’s doesn’t make either organic or Non-GMO claims. I don’t think that their production process is any less organic than Field Day, but the rights to use these seals costs money. I did find a small brand online that stated this directly.

Climbing up the price ladder, Coombs Family Farms, their 8 oz. bottle sells for $11.99. This translates to $1.50 per ounce, a 50% premium over Field Day for the same maple syrup. The Coombs label is pretty, they paid for a nice graphic of a rural farmhouse surrounded by maple trees, some with sap collection buckets. There’s a cute small bear. The label uses both the USDA Organic and Non-GMO seals.

The Coombs back label has another farm graphic showing a modern-day farm, as opposed to the idyllic front label. The copy on the back label makes pains to point out that it’s a family business. But Coombs is hardly small. They are sourcing large volumes of syrup from the United States and Canada. True, most maple syrup farms are small, it’s primarily a part time business for people who happen to own stands of maple trees. Quebec has 13,500 producers. The average producer accounts for less than one hundredth of one percent of global supply.

Coombs has made their brand mean something, and they get a nice premium for the brand they have built. I think a lot of it comes down to the attractive label graphic. That’s because the next brand on the list also has a pretty label.

Shady Maple Farms does not sell an 8 oz. size, but their 32 oz size matches the $29.99 price of Coombs. They also have an attractive front graphic featuring a rural farm house, maple trees and sap collection buckets. Their animal is a dray horse pulling a sled with a cask of maple syrup over the snow. It really captures the wistful conception of maple syrup farming from a century ago. The label features both the USDA Organic and Non-GMO seals.

Shady Maple Farms is a retail brand of a large Canadian farm co-op that markets maple syrup and some other crops. Their sourcing is exclusively Canadian syrup.

The final brand that I found at Plum Market was Stonewall Kitchen Maine Maple Syrup. The label is just text and follows the Stonewall Kitchen label template. This product is asking you to pay an immense premium to have the Stonewall Kitchen label on the bottle. Their 8.5 oz bottle runs $15.99, or $1.88 per ounce.

The label claims ‘All Natural’ and ‘Non-GMO’, but doesn’t use the USDA Organic and Non-GMO seals. They source their maple syrup from their home state of Maine, perhaps giving it a patina of ‘small farm’. Clearly the Stonewall Kitchen brand is doing the heavy lifting in getting to the $15.99 price point. They make great stuff, I love their marmalades, which are unique gourmet products. I guess if you can get a 25%, or better, premium over your competition for a generic product, more power to you.

What does it look like when you step back and look at the whole array of brands and sizes?

Maple Syrup Pricing by Brand and Size

*8.5 ounce

** 12.7 ounce

The main thing I noticed in the big picture is that the price spreads per ounce narrow for the larger sizes. If you are buying a 32-ounce jug, brand still matters, but not enough to stretch the value proposition into the thirty plus dollar price range.

Grades of Maple Syrup

Maple syrup can be sorted into grades based on color and flavor. A new uniform grading system was instituted in both Canada and the US in 2015, maple syrup now comes in four grades:

• Golden color and delicate taste
• Amber color and rich taste
• Dark color and robust taste
• Very dark color and strong taste

The retail products are primarily amber or dark grade. Under the old grading system dark maple syrup was labelled Grade B, which probably didn’t help sales. Before the 2015 standards revision dark maple syrup sold at a significant discount. That is no longer the case. A decade after the change some dark color products still carry a label burst calling out that this used to be Grade B.

Where Does Maple Syrup Come From?

The Canadian province of Quebec supplies two-thirds of all maple syrup, and the rest of Canada supplies a further 8%. The remaining 25% is produced in the United States. Unlike many agricultural commodities, it is still mostly a small producer business with thousands of small maple tapping operations delivering the raw ingredient to finished product producers. Most of the farmers are not in the business of selling finished products. 

This is why maple syrup is undifferentiated within the four quality grades. Almost the entire production of Quebec ends up in their producer’s warehouse, stored in barrels. American production by small farmers is aggregated on a smaller, but still industrial, scale by the packers.

According to Fortune Business Insights the global market for maple syrup was about $1.5 billion in 2024. Maple Syrup is a minor agricultural product, by comparison the value of corn grown worldwide was $300 billion. Sales of maple syrup are growing because it has some health benefits and it is not a refined sweetener. This has led to strong growth.

Other Syrups

Maple syrup is not the only sweet syrup on the market. There are several maple syrup and another ingredient blends; vanilla, dates and bourbon are a few of the options.

There are several syrups that have no maple in them whatever, but position themselves as maple adjacent. Lakanto Maple Flavored Syrup somehow put maple in the product name, without maple making it to the ingredient panel. Log Cabin is not so egregious, the label just features a snowy log cabin in rolling hills. Over the past hundred years the brand shifted the sugar component from a maple syrup/corn syrup blend to 100% corn syrup, but the graphics did not shift to reflect Iowa.

Finally, there are corn syrups like Karo that never try to be maple syrup at all. Corn syrup has sweetness without the flavors of maple syrup. The source of sweetness in corn syrup is from glucose while the source of sweetness in maple syrup is primarily sucrose, with some glucose and fructose. Corn syrup is also significantly cheaper.