Media - article - Telegraph Journal
The Telegraph-Journal in January 2007
Success is sweet for maple syrup producer; N.B. Company
Canadian Organic Maple Company ships worldwide from Bath
New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Page: B1
Section: Money
Byline: Charles Mandel Telegraph-Journal
Gus and Sandra Hargrove are experiencing the sweet taste of success. The owners of the Canadian Organic Maple Company near Bath are poised to become the world's largest producer of organic maple syrup this spring. That's when the Hargroves plan to tap 107,000 trees for the sticky stuff they export worldwide.
The tree-tapping operation is entering its seventh year of operation since the Hargroves, along with their sons and friends, cooked up the idea of an organic maple farm over the kitchen table. The company began in 2001 with a $292,500 loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and some 30,000 taps. Since then, the firm has steadily grown, adding more trees as well as staff. Today, the company employs 23 people.
When Canadian Organic first began, the company's avoidance of the use of para-formaldehyde
helped distinguish it from other producers. The substance was widely used in
trees in the industry to encourage sap to run longer, Gus Hargrove explained
in a telephone interview Wednesday. 
In recent years, however, para-formaldehyde has been banned and now the organic label Hargrove's firm proudly boasts refers more to the sustainable way in which they cultivate the land on which the trees grow.
"There are no additives to maple syrup, so that doesn't present any challenges," Hargrove said. "Maple syrup is probably the easiest crop to get organically certified."
Even so, that doesn't mean it's an easy sale. Organic maple syrup is currently experiencing tough times, according to "Canadian Maple Products: Situations and Trends 2005-2006", an Agriculture Canada report.
That report contends that production surpluses and the introduction of stricter standards requiring greater investment has actually contracted the organic syrup sector by 27 per cent in Quebec, where the largest number of producers operate.
Of New Brunswick's more than 300 maple syrup producers, five are certified as organic. Provincially, the industry - which is the world's third largest - employs some 2,285 people seasonally. In 2005, New Brunswick produced 1,230 metric tonnes of maple syrup worth $8.9 million.
Maple syrup might sound like an easy industry to get into: jam some spigots into a few trees and away you go. But the truth is, the business requires a lot of equipment.
For instance, Hargrove has $150,000 tied up in high-tech reverse osmosis filters to purify the sugars. And at $8 a foot, the line for carrying the sap from the tree doesn't come cheap. While the Hargroves have enjoyed government loans, they also invested their retirement savings into the business.
Overall, they've plunged a couple of million dollars into ensuring people have pancake topping.
Still, Canadian Organic seems to be prospering and their share of the national revenue has helped the company turn a small profit for the first time last year and reduce its ACOA debt to $80,000.
Along the way, the operation has received accolades. In 2004, the North American Maple Council awarded Canadian Organic the honour for "Best Maple Products." And in 2005, the company's Japanese distributor entered the firm in a national contest in which three chefs cooked with different sweeteners.
"It was hard to believe, but there were 700 sweeteners entered "... everything from rice sugar to coconut sugar, and our maple sugar was awarded second place," Hargrove said.
But Hargrove, an engineer whose background is in designing fire, gas and water containment systems for power plants and pulp mills and who spoke from Point Lepreau (where he is involved in refurbishment work on the nuclear power plant), isn't just depending on the steady drip of syrup for his cash flow. Rather, he's developing new technology he can sell to other syrup producers.
Already, he's invented a method to clean the lines that carry the syrup from the trees to the sugary. Drawing on technology from the power plant industry, Hargrove hooks a powerful vacuum to one end of the line that then draws a sponge through at high speed. The same technique is used in natural gas plants to keep the lines clean.
Hargrove is also working with engineers at the University of New Brunswick's Institute of Biomedical Engineering in Fredericton to create a wireless electronic control system that would detect leaks along the syrup lines. The monitoring system would help harvesters track breaks in the lines from where squirrels or bears might have chewed through and would have sensors at the end of each line.
The engineers are creating the chip as well as writing the computer code for the system, which they hope to bring to market in 2008.
Charles Mandel is a contributing editor with the Telegraph-Journal. He may be reached at cmandel@rogers.com.
© 2007 Telegraph-Journal (New Brunswick)