Image by Kai Hendry via Flickr

I love maple syrup. I don’t mean that artificially flavored “maple” syrup they sell in the grocery market. No offense to those of you who enjoy it, but that stuff is most definitely not the real thing – the consistency and flavor are all wrong.

My neighbors would tap the maple trees that flagged the driveway every year, serving up fresh sugar on snow to the neighborhood kids each winter. It was an amazing treat that I looked forward to all year (in embedding the above link, I’ve discovered that sugar on snow is traditionally accompanied by a pickle. I like pickles. I do not want a pickle with my maple syrup laden snow) along with Mrs. Hawes’ penuche fudge.

Has it ever occurred to me to steal maple syrup? Maybe as a kid when when my serving of sugar on snow was consumed, but I wouldn’t dream of it today. Maple syrup is very much a local product in the New England states. I support my fellow New Englanders when I pour that syrupy goodness on my pancakes (AKA an absorbent vehicle for eating more maple syrup). Other people are not so concerned about thieving.

A large warehouse in Canada, which houses 3.4 million liters of maple syrup, nearly 1/2 the US consumption per year (we consume 7 million liters every year!), made a surprising discovery during their last inventory. Someone stole a very large amount of their syrup – approximately $3,000,000 worth.

Anne-Marie Granger Godbout, the executive director of the federation, said that while it isn’t unusual for individual maple syrup producers to have stock stolen, having millions worth of syrup stolen is “unusual”.

“It’s the first time something like this has happened,” she said. “We’ve never seen a robbery of this magnitude.”

The thieves were crafty. They didn’t steal the barrels of syrup. They somehow siphoned the syrup out of the barrels so the warehouse owners aren’t even sure when the robbery occurred. That’s a whole lot of sugar on snow. Someone’s going to have a tasty winter.

- via Helablog