We’ve brought you news from the Quebec Maple Syrup Front many times. But we’ve never reported on Maple Syrup counterfeiting. Today… The story of a major Québec maple syrup producer who made up for crop failures by diluting his products with sugar…
There’s rally no substitute for real Maple Syrup on Saturday morning pancakes. Or any other applic-ation, any other time. But it’s been revealed that one major Quebec syrup producer has been ‘cut-ting’ It’s product with plain sugar, to make up for poor sugaring-off seasons the past few years.
Claim another dark victory for climate change…
Investigative journalism
It all started when a CBC journalist thought the flavour of a can of maple syrup he had just bought from his go-to grocery seemed ‘off’.
The French CBC network show Enquête bought five cans of the same syrup at random, from different stores and from different batches. Then it had the contents analyzed by the provincial laboratory responsible for testing and assuring quality control for maple syrup in Quebec, le centre ACER, for analysis.
The result was nothing less than shocking: All five cans contained at least 50 percent cane sugar.
“This is the first time I’ve seen falsification of this kind. You can see that it’s outright cane sugar that’s been added to the cans,” Luc Lagacé, microbiologist and Director of Research at ACER, told Enquête.
However, Geneviève Clermont, head of ACER’s Inspection Division also noted that 90 percent of Que-bec’s maple syrup is sold in bulk to repackagers and food processors. That’s where the agency focus-es its testing efforts. Individual producers are not checked for the purity of their wares. Even if the products are going out of province, to major retailers.
What happened…
Enquête staffers posing as wholesale buyers approached the producer, Steve Bourdeau of Saint-Chrysostome, southwest of Montreal. The asked a lot of pertinent questions, the answers to which were, to say the least, ‘illuminating’.
The ‘buyers’ also had with them a hidden camera, which captured Bourdeau stating it was illegal to cut maple syrup labelled as ‘pure’ with other sugars – but that he didn’t do that.
Bourdeau, however, told the undercover Enquête team he had been selling maple syrup to grocery stores for less than $5 per can, ‘alluding to some unspecified illegal practices’. Those Ontario cust-omers include the Metro and IGA supermarket chains.
“There’s a lot of jealousy going on. Because I have the market. And it’s not entirely legal. And I got away with it anyway,” Bourdeau was recorded admitting.
The bottom line?
“A producer can have a business relationship with another producer in Ontario. We have no control over that,” Lapointe told CBC.
But Bourdeau did admit, on hidden camera footage, that he buys most of his syrup from New Bruns-wick and Ontario, and cans it under his own brand name. Labelling that product ‘Product of Québec’ IS illegal. Selling it as ‘Pure Maple Syrup’ in Ontario may be less than statutorily legit. No word as of this post that he’s been charged with anything…
My take
Maybe… Just MAYBE… Bourdeau was victimized by his Ontario or New Brunswick suppliers, who could have adulterated the syrup before it came to him. But given the circumstances, I don’t think we’ll ever know.
This is just another of the major issues that has arisen since the Québec Maple Syrup Producers formed the ACER ‘cartel’. It controls almost all of the syrup produced in the province and stockpiles tonnes of it to help keep prices high for producers. But not all tree-tappers are happy with the set-up. That’s triggered rogue marketing operations such as Bourdeau’s, and large-scale ‘smuggling’ of syrup across the Québec borders – both ways.
And no matter how you look at it, it’s a huge problem for the public image of the Québec Maple Syrup Producers – who control 80 percent of the world’s supply!
I have to admit… According to what I’ve read on the subject, Bourdeau is not actually doing anything illegal under the official ‘maple syrup rules’. But he sure is profiting from misleading and deceiving customers, both wholesale and retail. I hope this incident sparks broader ACER and provincial gov-ernment investigations into the mis-labelling of Quebec maple syrup.
I’ve never purchased maple syrup in a can. But I HAVE noted over the past year or so, in the bottled syrup I usually buy, off favours and unusually mild ‘maple’ flavours in their taste profiles, which could well have been the result of dilution with cane sugar…
To paraphrase the old credit card commercials: “What’s in your bottle?”
~ Maggie J.