Walking down the grocery store isle, a bottle caught my eye. Maple Water. I thought it was interesting as my eyes read the bottle they slowly made their way down the the price tag on the shelf:
$2.49
Wow. So what’s in this magic bottle of elixir?
Ingredients: Maple Water
Actually, it went one more step and stated “Organic Maple Water”.
I’ll rant about organic being another day. Similar to a company telling me that my cane sugar is gluten free… Oh look, the maple water is gluten free also! Another day… Another day…
I cracked open the bottle and had a taste.
Upon the first taste, my assumption was that this is not sap direct out of a tree, but run lightly through a reverse osmosis machine. Pasteurized, bottled and stored.
So I had to test the sugar content:
That’s less than my taste buds had expected. I haven’t been having much sugar lately (New Years Resolutions are to blame there), so that must have heightened my senses on the sugar content.
I believe I’ll still stand by my theory that it is lightly run through an RO system. If only to be done to have a consistent tasting product and consistent sugar content from bottle to bottle, run to run.
Knowing the sugar content, we can then calculate the markup of maple water vs maple syrup.
2.5% sugar content – Using the Rule of 86 means that we would need (86 / 2.5): 34.4 gallons of sap for 1 gallon of maple syrup.
Looking up the current maple syrup pricing, I see that 1 gallon of pure maple syrup sells for: $47.50
Pricey? Yes. Delicious? Oh absolutely!
But now we’ve taken that same pre-syrup product – 34.4 gallons of sap, which is 4403 ounces when converted. 12 ounces in each bottle of sap water, that’s 366 bottles of sap water. Sell those at $2.49 each you have now turned your $47.50 syrup into $911.34
That’s over an 1800% markup on syrup! Get this… You didn’t have to boil it either!
Of course more cost goes into packaging. You’ll have 365 more bottles. But with that kind of markup, I’m sure you can swing some plastic bottles.
If Canada was smarter, the XL pipeline would be better utilized sending down Canadian Maple Sap than oil!
As someone that has had his fair share of maple water, sometimes right out of the sap bucket itself, the taste and flavor was very familiar to me and instantly brought back a lot of memories of spring. So for many people it will be a new unique taste. So yes, in short, it’s good. I think they’ve hit onto something both as a marketable product and a way to open up a completely different sales avenue. Nevermind the additional profit margins.
Will it catch on and become the next coconut water? Only time will tell.
Until then, Cheers!
