The Sugar Season (20 page)

Bruce had said he was better at buying syrup and David was better at selling it. David agreed, though he thought he knew just as much about the business as Bruce did. They used different strategies when it came to buying syrup. Both had suppliers they dealt with every year, the group of producers who were the foundation of their businesses. David understood his markets and tended to buy everything he needed for the entire year. He didn’t want to buy syrup on the spot market because he didn’t like speculating. Bruce was always on the hunt for good deals, ready to trade, and loved to make profits on swings in the price when he could. He liked to win. David noticed that Bruce used the language of war when it came to buying syrup. He thought Bruce had nerves of steel when it came to buying, and to business in general.

David’s supplier base was made up primarily of larger producers. Bruce had told David that he had 3400 suppliers in 2011, a number that included those small producers who came to Bascom’s with five-gallon containers. To David that seemed an impossible number. “How do you keep track? I’m
very engaged in the agricultural community in Vermont and want to support local agriculture, but I could probably do well with three hundred suppliers, not three thousand.”

He bought according to relationships, some that had begun twenty-five years ago when he had to scramble for markets. The majority came from Vermont and many from Franklin County. David had locked up Franklin County long ago and, in a way, all of Vermont, as he controlled fifty percent of the syrup in the state. His supply had at one point become so concentrated in Vermont that he decided to broaden his base and sought out suppliers in other states and in Canada. He and Bruce were the majority buyers in the St. Aurelie region of Maine.

He had a waiting list of producers who wanted to be part of what David referred to as his community. This community was composed not only of him and his suppliers but also, as he saw it, the biological community consisting of the forests and the greater environment. David had written a mission statement to express that idea and worked on the definitions with his family. He rewarded his suppliers for their loyalty with a 10 cent premium per pound, and he extended his loyalty to them. When he took a supplier on, he bought their entire crop, no matter what fortunes the season delivered. With the many millions of taps that fed into his warehouses, he sometimes bought more syrup than he needed. This happened in the bumper year of 2009 and again in 2011. For that reason the short season of 2010 had been a kind of blessing.

“I go by the feeling that if you trust someone they’ll trust you back,” he said. “And that if you’re loyal, you’ll get repaid for it. I like the people I deal with. On the producer side there are very few people I don’t enjoy working with. We are
lucky and can be selective now. I’m not as good at being as selective as I might be, but the people I have been working with and who have been loyal to me, I do a lot for them. We have put our business in jeopardy. In 2009 I bought too much syrup. It was probably a bad idea.”

David hadn’t set a price yet because if 2012 brought a large crop, he would have more syrup than he needed and would have to price on the low end. A short crop, and he could pay more per pound, use up his inventory, and comfortably buy all the syrup his producers made.

“E
VERYONE IS SO ENGAGED
with maple,” David said as we drove back to Morrisville. “I don’t know of any other crop that people respond to in that way. No one comes up to you and asks how your corn crop is going. Or how your second cutting of hay was. But everybody this time of year asks about maple.”

If there was one topic that he wanted to emphasize when we were together, I learned, it was the cause of pure maple syrup, a cause that had begun for him when he researched the blend market for the Forest Service.

The market for imitation maple syrup was an estimated $18 billion yearly. Imitation is a key word, because those products came as close as possible to resembling the real thing short of using the word “maple.” David would say that in the mind of most consumers, any breakfast syrup poured on pancakes had an association with maple. But those other products—Log Cabin, Vermont Maid, Mrs. Butterworth—contained no maple syrup. The laboratory stuff, Marvin
called it, the junk. Their flavor was a derivative of the fenugreek plant, and the sugar was primarily high-fructose corn syrup, the ubiquitous processed sweetener responsible for major contributions to the obesity epidemic in the United States.

David liked the fact that Vermont syrup had the reputation as being the best and hoped it would continue. But he also argued that sugarmakers should not compete with each other to prove that their brand was better than any other producer’s or any region’s. There was a better way.

“Only one person can win that battle,” he said. “Why spend money trying to convince the Chinese to eat maple syrup, when eighty-five percent of the pancake syrup in this country is artificial? Others in the industry, they think everyone knows about pure maple. They try to differentiate from one another. Why not make the case for pure maple? And everyone wins.”

We stopped briefly at a warehouse David was renting for the time being until his new building was completed. “Bruce doesn’t know I have this,” he said as we walked in. Inside, barrels upon barrels, stacked five high in long rows. It was carryover syrup, his inventory from the 2011 crop. “If it’s a short season this year, I’m going to look very smart,” he said.

Some of the barrels were from St. Aurelie and other northern points in Maine. I noticed one from a producer in Maine named Scott Wheeler, who sugars north of Jackman in Somerset County, the only county with greater production than Franklin County. A very capable large producer, I heard, who was previously based in Vermont. “I buy almost all of his syrup. He doesn’t talk that much. There’s so much BS in the business and I get a lot of it, but when you talk to
Wheeler you come to realize he knows what he is talking about.”

Back at the plant in Morrisville, he asked if I wanted to take a tour. David had given me a tour on my first visit, and I wanted to check my memory against the present. We went through the employee lunchroom, by the area where candy is made. When we passed by the bottling lines I thought, “Now I know what Bruce means.”

Along one part of the line they were bottling jugs for BJ’s, the large club supermarket. A little further along David lifted from a box a bottle with a label that read, “McClure’s Maple Syrup.” In another section, jugs with labels for the Big Y supermarkets in Massachusetts. Then he showed me a case of one-ounce bottles of maple syrup to be used for the restaurant trade. “We bottled some of these for Bruce last week,” he said.

He smiled, with what I thought was the pleasure of success.

“Why be competitors when you can be cooperators?”

The Bascom family at the sugarhouse, 1966: Ken, Bruce, Nancy, Brad, and Judy Bascom.

Ken and Bruce Bascom, tapping trees and hanging buckets, 1962.

Ken Bascom and his team, hauling sap, early 1950s.

Ken Bascom emptying buckets near Langdon Woods, early 1950s.

Sunday morning photo shoot for advertisement for sugar parties, 1955. Ruth, Ken, Judy, Nancy, and Bruce Bascom.