The Sugar Season (5 page)

Arnold Coombs had a description for the type of individual who owned these companies and played in the field of the second tier. He was a person who could manage risk, and also someone who could manage a large number of relationships. In Arnold’s words, “He’s the type of person who can borrow ten million dollars and put his house on the line.” Arnold said that person also needed a wife who could stomach those risks.

But Bruce did not put up the new building to compete in the second tier. He was aiming for the first tier. For him that meant Maple Grove, the largest maple syrup distributor in the United States. Maple Grove is based in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and has a long history of owners. Maple Grove is now owned by B&G Foods, the food products corporation that owns Ortega, Polaner, and Vermont Maid, an artificial pancake syrup. Maple Grove has sales of $80 million per year, and people on Wall Street read B&G Foods’ financial reports to see how the maple syrup industry is doing. Maple Grove supplies Walmart. They sell 40 million of those 1.5-ounce bottles of syrup each year, primarily to the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Those nips contained pure maple syrup until the shortage of 2008, when, out of necessity, Maple Grove blended with other sugars. After the shortage passed, Maple Grove continued to blend because it would have cost several million dollars to return to pure maple syrup. For Bruce, Maple Grove had long been a model. He used to go on tours of Maple Grove, look at the machinery, memorize
the names and numbers, and then slip out to his car to write down the information.

He didn’t ever directly say that he wanted to overtake Maple Grove; in fact, he said it would never happen in his lifetime, though he didn’t actually mean it. He would say that someone else was going to: “I predict that David Marvin will overtake Maple Grove one day,” he told me more than once. It took a while for me to understand that, by that statement, Bruce also meant himself. Once, when he gave me a tour of the new building when the foundation was being poured, we were looking down at the deep hole in the ground, at what would be a storage area for syrup, and I asked, “So will this put you in the first tier?”

“Oh yeah,” he said.

They started clearing the site for the new building the week before Bruce was inducted into the Hall of Fame. The trees were in Ken’s Lot, and because Bruce often talked about the difficult relationship he had with his dad, who was a tyrant to work for, there was a shade of symbolism hanging in the air that week. Once, when Bruce saw me coming from Ken’s Lot, he leveled a look at me and said, “You’ve probably been over there watching them cut those trees.” They were trees that Bruce knew very well, having grown up in the house that stood next to them. When Bruce returned from college he and Peter Rhoades inspected those trees and tested the sugar content of their sap, writing the percentages on the trunks and thinning the orchard to leave the sweetest trees.

“Did it work?” I asked.

“We’ll never know,” he answered. They conducted that experiment before reverse-osmosis machines came along and made high-sugar content redundant.

Some of the trees would be cut for firewood. Others would be shipped to a mill in Brattleboro, to be marketed as “taphole maple.” Taphole maple could be an appealing wood, with its holes suggesting another time and the work of the sugarmaker. The equipment store was paneled with taphole maple.

George Hodskins cut the trees in Ken’s Lot. George had been working at Bascom’s from the time he was nineteen, more than twenty years ago. His primary function was as a logger, and he owned a log skidder, a tractor designed to work in the woods, that he leased to Bruce. As the maples on the flatter part of the ground were removed, the others on the steep bank stood out in relief. They looked beautiful to me, perched alone on the hillside, and I pointed them out to George. He thought they didn’t look so great. Their crowns were too thin, he said. From a producer’s standpoint, the crowns of trees produce leaves and the leaves make carbohydrates, which are then converted into sugar once the thaw begins. Good maples need golden crowns.

George started working after Ken Bascom transferred the business to Bruce and went into semiretirement. Ken wanted to fire George, but Bruce wouldn’t do it. Ken Bascom was quick to fire people, I had been told. He couldn’t manage help, as Bruce had told me many times. George placed Ken Bascom in that generation of farmers who had a lot to teach but who yelled a lot. “He shouted like all these farmers around here. You could learn from them, but you learned at high volume.”

Ken was a hard guy to figure out. “A very nice guy, very charming, put on sugar parties for the kids, have lots of people up to the sugarhouse, but to work for him, he was a driver.
He would yell about the oddest things,” George said. “You could let a truck roll across the parking lot and he wouldn’t say anything. But if you did something like leave a door open, he’d yell at you. He said to me once, ‘If I was running things around here I’d fire you.’ Eventually I just ignored him and did my own thing. He complained about that too.”

The excavating crew came in, dug a deep hole, removed the sand, and crushed the big rocks. The concrete workers followed and built walls fourteen feet high, with a basement floor canted toward the middle, with drains in the event of a syrup spill. They installed girders and laid concrete planks to build the upper floor, then poured concrete over the planks and buffed the floor to a glassy smoothness. The construction workers assembled supports for the walls and arches for the roof, and as winter approached they covered the sides with steel panels painted the red color of the barns in New England. Bruce was pleased with that color. They built four loading docks for semis, three opening into the second floor warehouse and the fourth into the basement. Plumbers hooked up a sophisticated network of piping, leading from the silos to the new bottling room. Bottling machines arrived that were much like the machines at Maple Grove. Running at top capacity they would be able to fill eighty quarts per minute. In the basement a plumber and maple syrup producer named Jack Fuller installed an air-conditioning system that would lower the temperature to 40°.

One Saturday morning when the building was near completion Bruce gave me a tour of this basement. As we approached, he clapped his hands to show how the motion-sensitive and energy-efficient LED lighting system performed. We walked down a ramp into the cooler, the “New
Cooler,” as this would be called. (There was also an “Old Cooler” and a “Middle Cooler.”) The New Cooler was 100 feet wide and 210 feet long; if you took into account the 14-foot ceilings, the New Cooler was a 294,000-cubic-foot refrigerator. You could have played a hockey game in that basement and had room for bleachers.

“We will be able to store eight million pounds of syrup here,” Bruce said. “About sixteen thousand drums.”

Eight million pounds of syrup. The US crop in 2010 was 20 million pounds. Therefore, in this basement Bruce would be able to store more than a third of the syrup made in the United States in 2010. He could have stored one-fourth of the greater 2011 crop. But Bruce would not be storing just US syrup in the New Cooler; about half would come from Canada. The retail value of 8 million pounds of syrup at $55 per gallon would be $80 million.

At this point Bruce couldn’t afford to buy 8 million pounds of syrup, but he intended to grow into his new basement. “I will be able to fill this cooler in about five years,” he said. “That is, if the bank will give me more gas.” That was how he saw himself, as an engine running on the gasoline of money.

Arnold Coombs was also driving the construction of the new building. Arnold wanted to increase sales by twenty-five percent a year, from his $40 million in sales in 2010. Bruce’s job was to provide the syrup, in ever-increasing quantities.

B
RUCE TOOK OUT
a short-term loan, seven years in duration, because he wanted to pay the building off as soon as possible.
He had turned sixty in 2010. “My retirement will be spent paying for this new building,” he said, though actually the loan would be paid by the time he was sixty-seven. Time was a factor, though. “The future is my biggest problem,” he said. What he meant was that he didn’t have offspring coming into the business, neither of his two kids was interested, and he had no hard plan for what would happen to the company should something happen to him. “Fifty people would be looking for something to do,” he said. Not that he hadn’t been thinking about the succession problem; in 2010 he had hired a consultant from the business school at the University of Vermont to come in and examine the company regarding the matter of succession. She determined that Bruce, as the buyer of syrup in the field, was the one irreplaceable part.

He put up this new building during a recession. Bruce thought it was an advantageous time to build because construction companies would make low bids to get the work. There were those who disagreed with his decision. For his family members who lived nearby, the new building meant an ultimate departure from the kind of family farm Bascom’s had once been. They also wondered what would happen should Bruce depart. He got several requests from relatives for options on land, should he pass away. Bruce ignored them. His accountant said he should not take a risk on a building project at this time, but Bruce dismissed that advice on the belief that accountants were, by nature, overly cautious.

For a while it looked like the accountant was right. Bascom’s struggled during the summer of 2010 and in July, for the first time in many years, lost money. Bruce had developed
a large enterprise with equally large expenses. “I have to sell a million dollars worth every month just to keep things running,” he said one afternoon. During that summer he put some of the employees on partial furlough, four-day weeks.

I then asked if he regretted taking on the new project.

“Absolutely not.”

When Arnold secured the Gold Coast order the whole outlook changed. Going into the fall Bruce scoured about looking for Vermont syrup and put a statement in his catalogue that he was “looking for Vermont.” He made calls from the office and took drives up north. But the need was too great to fill by calling individual sugarhouses. Ultimately he called on his counterpart, David Marvin of Butternut Mountain Farms, who controlled the supply in northern Vermont—had it locked up, Bruce liked to say. Actually, Marvin controlled fifty percent of the syrup in Vermont. He came to Bruce’s aid, selling him eighteen trailer loads, a couple of million dollars worth—65,000 gallons. He was happy to move out inventory to make room for the next year’s crop.

By the summer of 2011, a year after beginning construction on the new building, Bruce had 5.5 million pounds of syrup in storage—not enough to fill the basement but enough, he figured, to carry him to the end of the year.

W
ORD TRAVELS FAST
in the maple syrup industry, and as the 2012 season approached, Bruce received inquiries about his company. He got an offer from the head of a venture capital firm that entered into the maple business by purchasing a Canadian maple company named L.B. Maple Treats. Now
that the financial situation had changed between Canada and the United States due to the monetary exchange rate, L.B. Treats was looking for a footprint in the United States and wanted to buy American syrup. “It would have made me a very rich man,” Bruce said of the offer, “but I would never sell.” He also received a proposal to manage the company from a Canadian named Tom Zaffis, the previous manager of L.B. Treats who was now managing the equipment division of LaPierre Company in Quebec. Zaffis believed Bascom’s would keep him interested for a long time, and his proposal to become second-in-command had left Bruce feeling very excited. He had received a similar offer from a manager in Ontario who heard of the new developments.

During that time, late in 2011, one of the companies in the second tier, Highland Sugarworks, underwent a traumatic change when its owner, Jim MacIsaac, died in the woods. MacIsaac was the newest presence in the second tier and coming on fast after starting his company twenty-five years ago, after attending the University of Vermont. MacIsaac had taken on a lot of producers and was competing with Bruce for supply in the St. Aurelie region of Maine and in Vermont. MacIsaac enjoyed working in the woods, and one afternoon in November he went out on a four-wheeler with a chainsaw to cut a tree. As it fell, the trunk bounced back into his chest. Though he tried, he didn’t make it out of the woods. “They lost their fearless leader,” Bruce said, and though the employees promised to continue as before, the future of Highland was in question.