The Birth of an American Maple Syrup Brand
How Runamok, the company behind Sparkle Syrup, came to life
Have you ever dreamed of quitting your job and becoming an organic farmer?
That’s exactly what Eric and Laura Sorkin decided to do in 2000. Today, they’re the owners of Runamok, a line of beautifully packaged, uniquely flavored maple syrup, honey, and cocktail provisions.
Eric and Laura met in the Environmental Management program at Duke. After graduation, they lived the stereotypical DC life as young consultants. But in 2000, their aspirations to grow vegetables (Laura’s dream) and live in Vermont (Eric’s dream) led them north. As Christine McGowan wrote in a March 2022 story,
“Laura dreamed of living closer to the land and operating a diversified vegetable farm. 'She was really interested in growing vegetables, said Eric, and I was interested in following her.’”
Soon, Laura was apprenticing at a farm and the young couple was looking for land of their own. Not long after, they found their place on the back side of Mount Mansfield, the highest mountain in Vermont.
For the next fifteen years, the couple ran an organic farm. As Laura tells it, “Eric was fixing tractors and building the greenhouse” while she did most of the farming. The farm grew to include a CSA (community supported agriculture) offering, where Laura wrote a weekly newsletter that included notes on the week’s haul and suggestions for preparing the freshly harvested produce. Laura eventually pitched a column to the Burlington Free Press about what was fresh and how to cook it. One day, Cider Mill Press reached out and asked Laura to write a vegetable cookbook. The result turned into an 832-page epoch published in 2020.
A decade or so into their journey as organic farmers, the Sorkins were confronted with the reality that it was going to be “hard to make a living selling vegetables” now that two young children had entered their lives. But provenance was right on their property. Their 600-acre “farm” was heavily forested. Sugarers (that’s slang for people who produce maple syrup) had been coming around asking to lease the land for syrup production. Eric decided to go all in setting up a maple syrup operation of their own. At that time, a 5,000 tap production was considered large. Today, the family has 86,000 taps on their Cambridge, Vermont property, and another 25,000 taps in Bolton - just 45 minutes south.
In case you’re not indoctrinated to the nuances of commercial maple syrup production, the tapping season generally begins in January.
Runamok uses a 12-person crew that navigates over 700 miles of tubing covering over 1,000 acres of land. Navigating waist-deep snow, the woods crew is responsible for line maintenance to ensure that leaks are minimized or avoided and that the sap, which will flow 24/7 when daytime temperatures begin to rise above freezing, flows to the sugarhouse, where the sap is boiled into syrup.
I happened to grow up with a maple tree in my front yard, so I’ve taken it for granted that maple is not found outside of northeast North America. But most maple syrup is produced in Quebec. In fact approximately 85% of maple syrup is produced in Canada, where an OPEC-like federation sets prices, determines how much to produce and holds a physical reserve of the product to help smooth year-to-year fluctuations in yield. Like honey, maple syrup can be stored for years. A bad year means reduced yield. Climate change is impacting sap flow and variable weather conditions. In 2022, most US production was down by as much as 50%. But regional variances do exist. Some north-facing areas tend to be colder than south facing areas and temperature deltas contribute to different outcomes every year, reinforcing an inevitable reality. Maple syrup production remains one of the last commercial foodstuffs that’s wild-harvested.
For the first seven years of sugaring, the Sorkin’s syrup business sold in bulk lots and was called Thunder Basin Maple Works. But the name was too long and became difficult to remember. So in 2016, when the Sorkin’s added Curt Alpert as a partner to bring a premium retail brand to life, they knew they needed to settle on a new name. Runamok was hotly contested. It was that range of viewpoints that helped convince Laura that it was right. After all, their previous name was not memorable. For a business that’s based in large part on the weather, “Runamok” seems ever more apropos.
Because the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers sets prices for 85% of the market, US-based maple producers have little ability to influence prices. This frustration led the Sorkin’s to innovate their way to upmarket offerings that differentiated from the plethora of locally produced maple syrup sold all over the Northeast. Their key insights included:
Maple syrup hadn’t been branded - it was still being sold in beige colored putty jugs. They saw an opportunity to use a different shape of bottle and bring design to what felt very homogenous and commodity.
Maple syrup was a fairly expensive item that could be packaged differently and presented with recipes to be turned into a gift.
It complements a lot of different flavors and had the opportunity to go beyond pancakes as a “pantry sweetener.”
In 2016, Runamok debuted at the New York Fancy Food Show.
Despite their suboptimal location in a discounted basement booth for emerging brands, their investment in bringing their line of infused, barrel aged and smoked maple syrups to the show led to press in the Wall Street Journal, Saveur, and later that year, inclusion in Oprah’s Favorite Things. For a company in its inaugural holiday season as a retail business, it was quite the coming out party.
To accommodate the rapidly scaling business, the team bought an old Scrabble tile factory in Fairfax, Vermont in 2017. The space was vacated by Milton Bradley when they moved production to China. Once upon a time, the game manufacturer turned maple wood into tiles. So in a circular way, retrofitting the facility to produce maple syrup was the perfect reprisal. Laura describes the facility, which the company began occupying in 2018, as an “expensive transformation, but totally worth it.”
Since their 2016 launch as Runamok, each subsequent year has led to further sales growth. In 2021, the business generated between $10-20 million in revenue.
Their #1 bestselling product was a complete surprise.
After seeing pearlescent mica (which was FDA approved in 2015) showing up in beer and spirits, Eric suggested to Laura that they put the glitter-like substance in their maple syrup. Laura expressed her doubts. Then along came COVID. Suddenly people were cooking a lot more breakfasts at home for their families. Desperate for moments of joy, Sparkle syrup - now patented - was the perfect antidote to lockdown days of drudgery. At $19 a bottle, it’s a special splurge. But it caught my eye at the Whitefish, Montana Safeway store, and yesterday morning I poured it over my Ube-Mochi pancakes, documenting my delight for my 1200 instagram followers. After all, sparkle syrup is exactly what dreams are made of, whether you’re 7 or 37 or 77.
As for what the best compliment that someone could give Laura might be? She loves hearing people’s amazement at how many ways maple can be used. As someone who used to prepare a team lunch every Friday until the team outgrew the capabilities of her home kitchen, she also gets abundant joy from hearing that people have tried her recipes and added them to their regular rotation.
As Runamok looks ahead, the future may include outside equity investors. A raise is currently underway. Proceeds could help finance further category expansion into other shelf-stable goods. Categories where there’s room for innovation, unique flavor profiles and better packaging seem like a good fit for the Runamok team. And it wouldn’t be their first time. In 2021, Runamok expanded into nature’s other exquisite sweetener and introduced a line of raw, infused, and hot honey. The company also created a collection of cocktail mixers, syrups and bitters.
Beyond the beautiful design and top-flight products are entrepreneurial environmentalists trying to build a sustainable business. So it comes without surprise that their facility is flanked in solar panels and that their employees are offered high-quality health insurance and paid family medical leave. And like Patagonia has received accolades for, Runamok hopes to one day offer their employees on-site childcare. At 85 employees today, it’s a sizable operation, one that you just can’t help but cheer for.