Sugar shack owners across Quebec are reopening their dining rooms for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and strangely, they are crediting the novel coronavirus with revitalizing their industry.
The spring sugar shack experience — eating beans and ham at long tables with strangers, enjoying tractor rides through the melting snow and nibbling snow-chilled maple syrup on wooden sticks — was on the decline before the pandemic. But two years of COVID-19 lockdowns have forced the traditional industry to reinvent an outdated business model, and some say it is more sustainable than before the health crisis hit.
“We’ve been doing the same thing for 50 years,” Camelie Gingras, manager of sugar shack La Goudrelle in Mont-St-Gregoire, Que., southeast of Montreal, said in a recent interview. “When I told my 84-year-old grandfather that we were going to do boxed meals for online orders, I can tell you, oh boy, he looked at me with a question mark on his face.”
Gingras and other owners of sugar shacks — know as cabanes a sucres in French — credit the industry’s resurgence to an online retail platform launched in February 2021 that allows them to sell take-home versions of the traditional spring meals. Created by the association that represents the province’s sugar shacks, the platform — Ma Cabane a la Maison — ended up reinventing the experience.
Sugar shack owners can now sell their products online year-round. They can also run a hybrid model: reopen for a limited indoor dining experience — with lower overhead costs — and sell take-home meals as well.
“People who didn’t go to sugar shacks before the pandemic are now ordering our meals to eat at home,” Gingras said. “It’s such a great opportunity for us.”
The pandemic might have been exactly what Quebec sugar shacks needed to revamp their staid, traditional offerings, Stephanie Laurin, chair of the industry association, said in a recent interview. Before the pandemic, the industry was facing an existential threat: mom-and-pop owners were getting old and had no one to take over the business.
Ten years ago, there were more than 200 sugar shacks across Quebec, but that number had dropped to about 140 before the pandemic, Laurin said.
“We were caught in our old ways and traditions, and we didn’t dare to evolve,” said Laurin, who also manages Chalet des Erables sugar shack north of Montreal.
“The pandemic made us realize we had stagnated while society was at a place where we needed online stores and for things to be accessible.”
