SIDEBAR: Syrup for 10,000: One Vermonter takes his family trade into the 21st century
Peter Cooper-Ellis, who owns and operates Hidden Springs Maple online and retail in Putney, and his family have been making maple syrup for more than 50 years, selling under the Cooper-Ellis Sugar Makers label during the 1950s and ’60s.
Yet Cooper-Ellis, who holds an engineering degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, lives in San Francisco, where he works at a software company in Palo Alto.
He commutes east about once a month to help with the business and to visit with his three grown sons and the rest of the family.
Cooper-Ellis and his brother Fraser started CE Maple in 1997, which uses current sap-collecting technology to boil about 10,000 gallons of syrup per year from the sap of 25,000 trees growing in a variety of nearby sugarbushes.
Hidden Springs (the name comes from a nearby road), wholly owned by Cooper-Ellis and started in 2009, markets syrup — primarily, the CE Maple syrup, but also product from producers all over the state. He said he hopes to produce his own syrup for Hidden Springs.
Hidden Springs, according to Cooper-Ellis, sells primarily online to 10,000 online customers through the company’s website, hiddenspringmaple.com, and on Amazon.com.
“Various people had tried to sell maple syrup online,” but without much success, he explained, citing hard-to-reach customers.
Further, Cooper-Ellis said, the problem with the maple industry relates to the multiple layers of middlemen and distributors.
“The Web has really matured as a shopping destination in the last five years,” Cooper-Ellis said. “I wanted to see if the farm-to-Internet-to-customer model could work so that a farmer could set up a website, advertise on Google, and sell syrup. Which is what I’ve done.”
Cooper-Ellis said he and his brother are very close, even though Fraser has nothing to do, by choice, with Hidden Springs.
“He’s a conservative guy, more interested in the farm aspect,” he said. “But I never could have developed Hidden Springs without his help and support.”
Cooper-Ellis spoke by telephone from the huge Fancy Food Show at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco — the first time Hidden Springs has gone to a major food show — where he has seen firsthand the niche that the business has in the wider marketplace.
Hidden Springs is a “real Vermont farm,” he said. “The larger packers don’t really have small family farms” producing for them.”
A little more than a year ago, Hidden Springs opened a retail store, attached to the picturesque family house at 162 Westminster Road, Putney, where syrup from various producers is sold, as well as a lot of other maple-related products, like candy. And gift baskets, art, beverages, and so forth.
Cooper-Ellis said he has been looking for a way to return to Vermont ever since he left in 1999.
The success of Hidden Springs Maple could be his ticket home.
