LONGUEUIL, Que.—The Québec Maple Syrup Producers federation last week broke ground on a new $14 million warehouse in Plessisville, Que. that will become the third warehouse of its Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. 

 “We just had a record harvest of 211 million pounds this spring that will allow us to replenish our reserve,” said federation President Luc Goulet. 

The new warehouse will be 104,000 square feet and will hold 52 million pounds.  It is expected to open in the spring of 2023. 

It will be the second largest warehouse in the reserve, just after the Laurierville installation which holds up to 55 million pounds.

With the third installation in Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly, the Strategic Reserve will ultimately have a total storage capacity of 133 million pounds (216,000 barrels) of maple syrup, the federation said.

The current holdings in the reserve are 25.8 million pounds, the federation told The Maple News on Tuesday, with 27 percent of that total being industrial grade syrup.  

At the beginning of the year, the amount of table grade syrup in the reserve had dropped to nearly zero, officials said at the time.

To keep up with skyrocketing demand, the federation has released 7 million new taps into its quota system, with more expected in the future.  Sales growth has been more than 20 percent per year for the last two years, the federation has reported.

The vast majority of those sales are in the United States.

“The construction of this third warehouse increases our storage capacity in time for the maple syrup to come from millions of new taps soon to join the production stream,” Goulet said.

Established by the federation in 2000, the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve is designed to ensure a constant supply of product to domestic and international markets, no matter the size of any given year’s harvest, the federation said. 

This has the effect of stabilizing prices, avoiding the significant variations caused by stock-outs or surpluses, the federation said.