Maple Syrup Production & Other Crops
The industry — Other crop farming
Base industry report for 1119 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 4,464
- Under 10 employeesA
- 87%
Of 4,464 Canadian establishments with employees, 87% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 1
The binding constraint — entry cost + regulatory drag
A residual code — hay, tobacco, hops, open-field cannabis, combination farms and maple — and most of it cannot be screened as one thing. The count points at the niche worth a look: Quebec holds 1,662 of the 4,464 establishments [A], and Quebec is maple. This is the most reachable door in crop farming, and the screen says so plainly. Canada produced 18.9 million gallons of syrup in 2025, the second-highest year on record, 90% of it in Quebec [A]; the producers' board, citing high demand and a strategic reserve low on stocks, has responded by issuing quota. At its January 2024 draw, Québec Maple Syrup Producers allocated 7 million new taps against 2,709 eligible applications for 9.4 million, admitting 739 new enterprises out of 814 start-up applications [A]. That is not a closed shop. The drag is in how the door opens. Bulk syrup in Quebec may only be sold through the board's agency, at its negotiated price, against quota — and quota is issued when the board decides to issue it: seven million taps in 2021, again in 2023 — the issue drawn in January 2024, partly by lottery, with 5% reserved for start-ups on public land — and again in June 2025, then no new quota at all for 2026 [A]. An entrant cannot choose its year, its size or its price. And the application presupposes the real asset: a stand of mature sugar maple, which takes decades to grow and which the 1,871 existing enterprises that also won expansion taps [A] are better placed to buy or lease than a newcomer. Outside Quebec there is no quota and no agency, and also a tenth of the industry. This screen does not find a clean kill for maple — it finds an entry gated by a regulator's timing and a forest. A full study would price a tapped bush per tap and test returns at the board's price. Hay, hops, tobacco and the rest were not examined.
Maple grows where sugar maple grows, and the rules change at the provincial border: Quebec producers sell bulk syrup through a single agency against quota, while Ontario, New Brunswick and the US states do not. A producer competes for forest and for quota inside one province. The residual crops in this code have no shared geography at all.
Sectors joined: Agriculture · Cellular Agriculture
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 5 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Québec Maple Syrup Producers sales agencyA | not disclosed | — | Statutory single desk: all bulk syrup in Quebec is sold through it, against quota, at its price. It is the entrant's counterparty and its gatekeeper at the same time. Its own sales value was not sourced. |
| Authorized buyers (the licensed bulk packers)A | not disclosed | — | The only legal purchasers of bulk syrup. Their number and identities were not sourced; the accreditation conditions were read on the board's own page. |
| CitadelleB | not disclosed | — | Producer co-operative dealing in maple, honey and cranberry, on its own account since 1925. Revenue not published and not sourced. |
| Producers outside QuebecA | not disclosed | — | Ontario 972 establishments, British Columbia 568, Alberta 438 across this residual code (Statistics Canada, December 2023). No quota and no agency — and about a tenth of Canadian syrup. |
| The single-operator majorityA | not disclosed | — | 3,133 of the 4,464 establishments in this code have one to four employees; one has 200–499. The competitive structure is thousands of family operations, not firms. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. Establishment counts are Statistics Canada's business counts (December 2023) and cover the whole residual code, not maple alone. Production is read from Statistics Canada's Daily release on 2025 maple products, which carries no dollar value. The quota figures are read from Québec Maple Syrup Producers' own release of 24 January 2024, and the sequence of tap issues and the 2026 decision from its 16 June 2025 communiqué and its Quotas for 2026 notice — a producers' marketing board with statutory powers describing its own allocation, treated as tier A for what it allocated and not for its optimism about demand. Added in the completion pass: the price a cash authorized buyer pays the producer ($1,450 per barrel on receipt, trued up on grading), the conditions for becoming an authorized buyer, and the rule that direct sales to consumers in containers of five litres or less need no quota — all read on Québec Maple Syrup Producers' own selling and buying pages, September 2026. Citadelle is described from its own website and carries no figure. Still not sourced: the agency's price per pound, the number and identity of the authorized buyers, the cost of a sugar bush per tap, and any producer's margin; no series of past barrel prices was found, so the $1,450 is a level and not a trend. The claim that existing enterprises are better placed to acquire forest is reasoning. The remainder of the code — hay, tobacco, hops, open-field cannabis, combination farming — is UNVERIFIED in the fullest sense: it was not examined. The cut factor is analyst judgment, and the record says it is not a clean cut.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
The marketing board that issues quota (contingent) and buys all Quebec bulk syrup; homepage cites 8,400 maple enterprises, 58.6M taps and a 229.5M lb 2026 crop.
Producer association; membership tiers by tap count (under 250 to 5,000+); runs Maple Weekend each April; members can add Maple Digest and Maple News subscriptions.
Umbrella of state and provincial producer associations; publishes crop reports, the Maple Syrup Digest and the Maple Hall of Fame.
The council's annual conference; 2026 program and registration form posted on this page.
NAMSC's official quarterly since 1962; issues online to June 2025; often bundled with provincial association dues.
Vermont-based maple industry trade paper with season summaries, Cornell and UVM Proctor columns and an e-newsletter.
Sugaring discussion forum and used-equipment marketplace run by MapleGuys; regional tapping and equipment threads; blocked automated access.
The International Maple Syrup Institute site blocks automated access and is not listed. nsmaple.ca (Nova Scotia) is now a parked for-sale domain; nbmaple.com did not respond.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.
No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch yet. The base industry report says what the subsector typically runs on.