Food Service Distributors Are Supplying Maple Syrup to Chefs… For Now

| JUNE 8, 2014 |

Are you a chef?  Do you like to use fresh local ingredients?  Are you a chef in Western PA or Ohio?  Do you use pure maple syrup?  Then why are you buying maple syrup from a food distributor?  Let’s think about this a moment.

Ohioans and Pennsylvanians make a lot of maple syrup, award winning maple syrup.  For years Bissell Maple Farm made maple syrup and sold the excess drums of our wonderful maple syrup crop out-of-state to Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Vermont, etc.  The maple syrup was repackaged with an out-of-of state label and shipped right back to Ohio and PA.  It won’t say Pennsylvania or Ohio on the label.  It might have an address label of the repackaging factory, like – NY or VT.  Doesn’t this seem like a lot of excess cost from material handling and shipping  – when you can just buy it direct from the farmer?  There is certainly a business case for a regional maple syrup supplier in the Midwest.  Today, not only do we keep all of our maple syrup local – we source from other maple farmers and keep their maple syrup local, too.

So here you are.  You are a busy chef trying to keep a busy kitchen running.  I’m sure you have maple syrup in your cooler.  I’m pretty sure one of your food distribution companies is supplying your maple syrup.  I get it.  It is easy and you are busy.  You didn’t know a maple syrup farm capable of meeting your needs existed in Ohio.  A maple farm that can supply maple syrup year round – provide kosher maple syrup from an inspected facility.

Bissell Maple Farm recognized the industry need and started investing in capacity and infrastructure to meet this need.  We are a maple syrup producer, maple syrup packager, and a maple syrup distributor – we are focusing a portion of our resources on the food service industry.  We supply high quality maple syrup, eliminate the middle-man to generate a savings.  And we make it easy on chefs.  You can text, call, email – we’ll get your maple syrup on our delivery trucks.  We currently deliver to Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Akron, Youngstown, Erie and Pittsburgh.

I hear, “maple syrup is so expensive” all of the time.  Well, those people would be right.  It isn’t a cheap sweetener.  Neither is the production process.  And there is a lot of excess commercial cost in maple syrup that shouldn’t be there.  For one, often maple syrup is getting shipped hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands of miles, before it is bottled in a factory.  Then, it gets shipped to a warehouse of a food service distributor before it gets to your plate.  We are offering maple syrup direct from the farm and can shave a lot of those commercial costs out of that gallon of that sweet goodness for you.