Social & Environmental
SOCIAL IMPACT
Maple Craft Foods’ ultimate mission is to help families Make Life Sweet…a goal that can never fully be realized without first feeling safe and equal. As such, we are proud to join with the famed Ellen’s Restaurant in Dallas, TX, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and countless other socially conscious businesses who actively support efforts to reverse the growing gun violence epidemic.
We also support racial equity initiatives because throughout our efforts to better understand gun violence, it has become clear that systemic racism is also a root cause of obesity, malnutrition and food insecurity...all issues we care deeply about.
Like the way Ellen’s honors Dallas police officers who were shot and killed near their restaurant, we honor the lives taken here in Sandy Hook, and elsewhere, by donating a portion of our sales to gun violence prevention and food insecurity initiatives. Please click here to shop and support.
Maple Craft Foods also makes our turn-key “Make Life Sweet” fundraising program available to local and national volunteers and advocates including PTO/PTA’s, scouting troops, survivor, school, religious, student, civic and other groups to help raise the money needed to bring about positive social change in our communities. Please click here to learn more and contact us about running a turn-key fundraiser.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Mother Nature is not happy....and you don’t have to be a scientist to come to this conclusion. Climate change is real and the maple industry understands this better than most. Winters are not what they used to be, and this makes it more unpredictable and costly to harvest maple sap. We are committed to reducing our carbon footprint and doing whatever we can to turn things around. That's why we have partnered with student-led Tree-Plenish to help them offset the amount paper used by their schools by planting trees in their communities. Below are a few other examples of our commitment.
Distillery Partnership
- Our unique partnership with the Litchfield Distillery enables us to produce award-winning products, while minimizing our environmental impact.
- Most bourbon barrels travel long distances, requiring fuel and causing them to dry out. We get our barrels locally, within hours of being dumped, enabling us to fill them with maple syrup immediately while the wood is still soaked with award-winning bourbon.
- We return the barrels to the distillery after aging our maple syrup, so they can refill them with bourbon to make their amazing maple flavored bourbon.
- The cycle then begins again, ensuring no natural resources are wasted while making the best tasting products.
Solar
- Solar panels have been installed on our corporate office and fulfillment center, supplying 90% our electricity. In Connecticut, most of our energy is imported from other states and is generated by burning fossil fuels, which directly contributes to climate change.
Packaging
- We use packaging materials made from recycled material whenever possible, and we have undertaken an initiative to eliminate single use plastic throughout our operation, including among outside vendors. As such, we have eliminated the use of plastic bubble wrap at our wholesale fulfillment center and will continue to make improvements.
- We do not use mass produced maple syrup that is “flash-cooked” using steam in a factory setting.
- We do not use syrups made from blending different quality syrups that have traveled long distances to a syrup factory.
- We only use premium, single source, Grade A Dark/Robust maple syrup that is slow-boiled, traditionally, over an open flame on a small family farm in Vermont.