-Katie

Katie is a native Vermonter and has been here at Wild Woods Maple since its start. Maybe you have spoken to her on the phone if you have called us or maybe she has given you a free sample of our syrup at an event. In many ways she is the face of our business, always telling our story to customers and dropping off maple syrup at the stores we work with. She works tirelessly to keep our business organized and inventory updated. She is a master of finding the best deals to ship syrup to customers and has optimized our processes in so many ways. When not in the Wild Woods Maple office she can be found in our forest working on tubing. Outside of maple, she has developed her own curriculum to home school our two daughters and has creatively tied maple production into their learning. She has her masters degree and has taught young children in Tanzania and Tibet.

-Rob

Rob is retired from the U.S. Army after 26 years of service to pursue his passion for the maple industry. He spent his time in the Army as an Infantryman who deployed to Ramadi, Iraq and eastern Afghanistan. Rob spent the majority of his military career at the Army Mountain Warfare School teaching mountaineering techniques to fellow Soldiers. Rob is also a native Vermonter from Lyndonville, VT. Here at Wild Woods Maple he is mainly in charge of production, maintenance of the tubing and the building of our sugar houses. He has recently designed and helped build our new sugar house in Walden, VT where our veteran and family owned business can grow.

Katie and I started making maple syrup in our wood shed in the spring after we used all the wood out of it to heat our home. The sap from 20 buckets was boiled on a turkey fryer that ran off propane, which was an extremely inefficient way of doing things. As the years passed we made upgrades to our maple sugaring operation each season. The year we bought our first evaporator, we collected from over 170 buckets that were scattered about in our forest. The sap gathering process took two hours then we would stay up until 3 AM to try to boil it all into maple syrup. The next year we sold the buckets and installed tubing that would bring all the sap to one central tank in our woods. We used a pump to move it all up to our sugar house and this greatly helped. It helped so much I figured it was a good idea to add more taps. We found we had added so many new taps that we needed a bigger evaporator to handle all the sap! In 2016 we bought a new evaporator and slowly upgraded it over the next few years. We successfully negotiated tapping our neighbors trees so we could gather more sap to boil. Every year we have made changes to our maple operation as most producers do. One of the biggest changes came when we bought land in Walden, VT.

Our Journey continues

We are excited to be finished building our new sugar house!! There will always be aspects of our maple operation that we change or update but the lions share of the work is finally done. It has taken us 3 years to get to the point where we can fully move our production into this new and modern facility. It will be getting inspected by multiple organizations that we have voluntarily invited over to ensure a quality product. This is the biggest project we have ever taken on and we are proud of what we have built. Quality is our goal. We are thankful and forever indebted to the people who have helped us get this far in an extremely competitive maple market. Customers like you have been invaluable. Thank you for your encouragement and we hope you find that our hard fought product is the best maple syrup available.