The Rural Voice, 1993-12, Page 26Sweet Christmas thoughts
Far from being a spring part-time business, Robinson's Maple Products
finds Christmas season is a prime sales period
By Keith Roulston
Christmas is a time when
visions of sugar plums dance
in the heads of children. Bill
and Susanne Robinson want
those sweet visions to include maple
sugar.
The Robinsons operate
Robinson's Maple Products at St.
Augustine in Huron County and
while people usually think of spring
when they think about maple syrup,
the Christmas season is a major
marketing time for the family. In
fact, October, November and
December are the peak sales time of
the year followed by the February to
April period when people are
visiting their sugar bush.
In an age when one or both
spouses in most farm families
have to take off -farm jobs, the
Robinsons make their living
from what is a sideline on
most Ontario farms. With
12,000 taps, they are the
largest maple syrup producers
in Ontario (though small by
comparison to Quebec
operations that have up to
20,000 taps). Still, although
they have an efficiently
operating production facility,
it's marketing that allows the
couple to get the most from
their syrup. When they first
started maple syrup
production back in 1976, a
gallon of syrup sold for $11
and most of their syrup was
sold in bulk by the barrelful.
But more and more people got
into syrup production, bulk
sales dropped, and they began
to look at ways of marketing
their own product and getting
more out of it. Today Susanne,
who looks after marketing, has
a clientele of 70 stores
throughout southern Ontario
and as far away as Detroit. As
well as syrup, she has
developed a diversified line of
22 THE RURAL VOICE
Susa
maple products, including maple
sugar candies. During most of the
year she calls on the stores once a
month. Leading up to Christmas
she's on the road every two weeks,
loading up the car with as much as
she can carry, filling orders on the
spot for the stores or, if she runs out,
shipping the product via courier after
she gets home.
The candy making began in the
family kitchen, but in 1982 they built
an addition on the front of their
house which serves as a kitchen and
work area on the main floor and
contains a cold room downstairs for
holding the top quality syrup
Susanne uses to make her candy. It's
a huge improvement from having
candy moulds spread out all over the
kitchen, she says.
The kitchen of the addition
contains a small stove for boiling the
syrup and a drying cabinet for the
candy after it has been moulded and
dipped. Along the way the Robinsons
have also offered stirred sugar, which
makes use of breakage from the
moulding operation, and maple butter
(a creamy spread for sandwiches),
maple jelly and maple dip.
It's important to keep coming up
with new twists, Susanne
says. About September
each year as she makes her
rounds of the stores, they'll
start asking what's new,
whether a new product or a
new way of packaging.
"You always have to find
something to keep them
satisfied."
The stores generally sell
small gift packages priced
from $5 to $12 wholesale.
One of the Robinsons'
relatives makes the little
wooden crates to make up
the packages. In fact the
operation is truly a family
affair with the Robinsons'
daughters Patricia, Heather,
Jennifer and Catherine
(aged 16 to eight), all
involved in packaging and
making maple butter. They
get paid only if they go out
to the kitchen to work (no
sitting in front of the TV
while working).
Over the years the
Robinsons have
developed a gift
basket business,
making up baskets
specially for people who
wanted to give gifts for
birthdays, as a thank you or
nne Robinson with a variety of her gift suggestions.