Over the past year, we have been paying attention to the wide variety of issues resulting from problems with the world’s supply chains. It is a constant reminder of how interconnected the world is and how vulnerable we have become to breakdowns or changes in the chain. The most interesting chain-related shortage that has come to our attention is maple syrup. Apparently, with more people working, schooling, and just hanging out at home, sales of maple syrup have climbed significantly. Worldwide demand has increased by more than 20 percent. While recent years have been strong ones from the standpoint of maple syrup production, adding to the current syrup squeeze is a much more average or modest harvest this past year.  

FYI – True maple syrup is made from the sap of maple trees in eastern North America when alternating freezing and thawing temperatures in spring cause sap to flow. I learned that as a child by going on weekend vacations to Brown County, Indiana for celebrations of all things maple syrup. Southern Indiana is the southern and western-most position in the North American maple sugar belt. The bulk of the production comes from areas north of there, primarily in Canada. That is why coming to the rescue of maple syrup lovers are the syrup producers in the Canadian province of Quebec. They recently announced that they are releasing more than half of the world's only strategic maple syrup reserve to keep up with rising demand. 

This isn’t the first time the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (QMSP), a government-sanctioned union of syrup producers, has come to our attention. This organization controls over 70 percent of the maple syrup market. And while that alone is enough to draw our attention, it was their set of values used in operating the organization that first bought them to us. 

One of the things we noticed as we built out the Community Shared Value concept was that we were in many ways writing a planning document for our industry, complete with vision, mission, values and goals. When you add Destinations International’s Destination NEXT Futures Study, you add industry trends and strategies. We tried to identify another industry that had done this and we could not find any. However, we did find something close in the QMSP.  

The QMSP has been largely successful in stabilizing prices in an industry where the supply is never predictable because of annual variations in production. It does this by having many drums of maple syrup stacked at the Global Maple Syrup Strategic Reserve in rural Québec. Surpluses are stored in good years, and it is from the reserve that syrup is released in the lean years. 

It is a fascinating organization with an interesting history that includes a multimillion-dollar syrup heist. But for our purposes, we are interested in the fact that they laid out industry values, defined them and put them up on the website for everyone to see.