SWEET MAPLE TREES AND SERENDIPITY
Leftovers from wine project starts family business
Steam flows like a river of white puffy clouds from a sugar shack on a dirt road in rural Marathon County. Inside, Mitch Hoyt wheels up to a sleek stainless steel cooker reminiscent of an old steam train engine. It’s making nearly as much noise.
Hoyt checks a gauge as golden brown sugar laden liquid gushes from the cooker’s spigot into a holding tank. Satisfied with the readings, Hoyt dips a thin cylindrical cup in a pool of maple syrup in a holding tank. He tests the density.
There’s a science to Hoyt’s art, but a taste test is the only test one needs in order to confirm Hoyt’s syrup making skill. Warm. Smooth. Viscous. Maple sweet. It would be a perfect topping over a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream. But that’s another story.
As it is, the Skinny Sticks’ Maple Syrup story is an unlikely one. Hoyt’s original idea was to turn maple sap into wine. If not for serendipity mixed with a
certain set of skills and a tight family bond, Skinny Sticks’ Maple Syrup wouldn’t have distributed 35,000 gallons of Wisconsin maple syrup last year across much of the United States.
Skinny Sticks’ origins can be traced to a 2008 maple syrup expo in Neillsville. Hoyt was working as a sales specialist for Membrane Process & Controls, which develops membrane filtration systems like reverse osmosis water purifiers.
“An old guy came up to the booth and asked if I liked to drink,” Hoyt said.
Mitch said he liked brandy and occasionally wine with a meal. At the mention of wine, the guy said he had something Mitch would like.
“So I rolled over to his table,” said Hoyt, who uses a wheelchair. “He pulled this clear jug from under his table and he poured me, in this paper cup, this clear liquid. I tasted it and I was like whoa. I had this warm alcohol burn with this nice maple flavor.”
It was maple wine and it got Hoyt’s marketing wheels turning.
“I thought if I make this, I could sell this.”
Mitch got the wine recipe from the guy and called his wife, Christine, during the ride home. They had sugar maple trees on their hobby farm, but he needed help from her and their four daughters to tap the trees.
“Mitch has these hobbies that tend to eat up money,” Chris said. Then halfkidding, half-serious she told him, “This one better make money. I just wanted this venture to work out and not be a fun money pit for a while and then forgotten about.”
Little did Chris know that this hobby would become a family business that would employ three people full time (besides Mitch and Chris) and a halfdozen part-timers.
The Hoyt’s gathered enough sap for Mitch to make all the wine he wanted with about 50 gallons of sap left over. A friend told him how to cookthe extra sap down to syrup on the stove. He followed the instructions and made about eight quarts of syrup.
“I wasn’t really interested in that,” Mitch said. “I gave that away to friends and family and a neighbor.”
A month later the maple syrup recipients told Mitch it was the best syrup they’d ever had and not to just give it away if he made it again.
Trees matter
While attention to detail played a part in producing syrup that garnered rave reviews, the Hoyts had unknowingly tapped unusual sugar maples.
Typically it takes 20 to 60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. But the trees growing on the Hoyts’ land are ‘super sweet’ sugar maples developed by Cornell University Uihlein Maple Research Forest to produce sap with higher sugar content, yielding more syrup per gallon of sap.
Helen and Noel Weber, who used to own the Hoyts’ farmstead, planted 50 super sweets that they got through a lottery drawing to introduce 500 of the trees to Wisconsin.
“I told her we only need 15 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup,” Mitch said. “She said, ‘I was wondering if those would be as good as advertised.’”
Next year the Hoyts tapped enough trees to make 12 gallons of syrup and 25 gallons of wine. Acting on the feedback from the previous year, they sold the syrup. It sold out in a week.
“I might be on to something if I can scale this,” Mitch said.
In 2013, when their eldest daughter, Abigail, left for college in Dubuque, Iowa, Mitch started a sales route that would allow him to visit her.
During the first trip he sold syrup to mom-and-pop stores. On his second trip, he pitched Skinny Sticks’ Maple Syrup to Hy-Vee stores in Dubuque. HyVee bought $1,500 of syrup between three stores, said Mitch, and by the end of the week called him to ask for more.
Demand kept growing and stocking shelves, which he had to do almost every day, began to wear Mitch out even with help from family and friends.
Then Skinny Sticks’ caught the attention of distributors in 2014, which reduced the need to stock as many shelves himself but created another problem to be solved: How to meet demand.
That’s when Mitch discovered there were thousands of gallons of maple syrup produced within 25 miles of their house being shipped to states like Vermont, where they are blended with East Coast and Canadian maple syrup and sold by national brands. Furthermore, Mitch said he didn’t see a Wisconsinonly maple syrup brand being sold nationally.
Needing enough syrup for 240 HyVee stores serviced by one distributor, and still stocking the shelves of other stores he still self-delivered to, meant he needed syrup of the same quality that had made their product popular. He bought 3,000 gallons from one producer, but sold out by October. Then 1,200 gallons from another source sold out by December. Finally, he bought 1,200 gallons from another supplier. That got Skinny Sticks’ through until spring production.
Mitch and Chris taste samples to be sure the syrup is smooth, clean and has a gentle finish. However, they do embrace a maple syrup’s uniqueness.
When making syrup from their ‘super sweet’ maple trees, Mitch said he noticed butterscotch undertones. When he made syrup with sap from a neighbor’s trees he noticed cinnamon undertones.
He thought he was doing something wrong, but the friend who taught him how to make maple syrup reassured Mitch that flavors can change from year to year.
A Cornell study identified about 300 different compounds in syrup, but not all are present in each batch. This explains how some syrups have caramel, vanilla, nutty, buttery, honey, chocolate or coffee flavors.
Those flavors develop from tree genetics, soil type, growing conditions and processing techniques, Mitch said.
“Every producer is going to have syrup that’s a little bit unique,” Mitch said. “But if they make it right it should be smooth and clean and have a gentle finish. It won’t have any bite to it at the end.”
When a producer blends syrups together, it homogenizes the flavor. Mitch said they don’t blend syrup from different producers. If customers think they notice different flavor undertones, they’re correct. And, they probably have a fine-tuned palate.
Not that the Hoyts are opposed to adding a dash of other flavors to their syrup. Requests from distributors and a chain of stores in Louisiana have led to bourbon barrel aged, honey and vanillainfused maple syrups.
Mitch employed an “I could figure it out” attitude when it came to the flavored syrups.
For the Bourbon Barrel Aged Maple Syrup, he added hot syrup to bourbon barrels and began sampling at regular intervals. After three months, Mitch said, the balance of maple and bourbon flavors gelled.
For the Bees & Trees Honey Maple Syrup, Mitch ordered a barrel of honey from a nearby producer and worked on the recipe in the kitchen to get the honey to blend without crystallizing.
When it came to vanilla-infused syrup he started by adding vanilla beans when hot-packing barrels, but the vanilla flavor was muted. So, Skinny Sticks’ adds organic vanilla beans in each bottle before filling with hot syrup.
Maple syrup business moving at “jet plane” speed
Skinny Sticks’ growth from a few gallons made on the stove to a full-time business housed across three buildings on their property wasn’t anything either of them anticipated.
Last year Mitch said they bottled 35,000 gallons by hand. The Hoyts hope to add a semi-automated bottler this summer or fall.
As the business grew, Mitch increasingly went to Chris with more details to keep track of.
At one point she told him, “I feel like you’re driving a fast speed jet and I’m hanging on to the wing outside.” But it’s been a ride worth taking. “If you would have asked me seven years ago ‘hey, I want you to grow this big business,’ I would have been like, ‘no way that’s not for me,’” Chris said. “But it’s been a good growing experience.”
Mitch said his past sales rep jobs that ranged from $500 sales to small stores to $3 million contracts with a dairy company provided the skills needed to grow Skinny Sticks’ sales.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t gone through everything that got me to this point,” Mitch said. “It was like when I turned 40 years old the lights came on and I could just see this business, this opportunity and it just grew.”
He’s also thankful for Chris’ organizational skills.
Chris said they’ve learned to trust each other’s strengths, which has been a good skill to learn.
And, there are other people Mitch credits for Skinny Sticks’ success.
“I got paralyzed in 2006 and one thing I learned while in the hospital is I need help,” Mitch said. “When I started this business, I recognized the value of bringing other people on to the team to be able to use their skills and talents to grow something bigger. If I was abled bodied, this company probably wouldn’t exist.”
He wouldn’t have asked Chris for help, Mitch said, nor brought on other people. Pride in the quality of his maple syrup would have kept him from using syrup from other Wisconsin producers. But with his ego in check, Mitch said he, “saw there was a problem, there is this mass of maple syrup that’s not being sold as Wisconsin maple syrup.”
Letting the rest of the country know that Wisconsin makes great maple syrup is important to Chris .
“Wisconsin should be very proud of her sugar makers,” Chris said. “They work hard and a lot of them have full time jobs in addition to making syrup. And from what we’ve heard from many different people, Wisconsin syrup is one of the best in the U.S.”