New Brunswick is one of the three largest producers of maple syrup in the world. The syrup is produced by the evaporation of maple sap harvested in early spring when the temperature drops below freezing at night and rises above 0 degrees Celsius during the day.
Upon the arrival of the White people in America, First Nations have given them the basic techniques of making maple syrup. At the time, they cut maple trees with tomahawks and installed a wood chip in the slot to flow the sap into bark containers. The sap was then poured into a clay bowl and placed over a wood fire to be boiled until it became a delicious golden syrup.
The production of maple syrup is a tradition in the region of Paquetville. Sucrerie Chiasson, formerly Sucrerie Thériault, was founded around 1910 by Moïses Thériault who subsequently bequeathed it to his son André. In the 1970s, André’s children inherited the sap house and had about 1 200 maple trees.
Since then, Marc Chiasson and his wife Line Doiron bought the company and now have about 4 500 maple trees whose sap is collected through a system of pipes connected to a modern high capacity evaporator. In Octobre 2010, they acquired L’Érablière du Village, founded in 1978, which allowed them to increase their production capacity to 14 000 tapped maple trees in addition to offering another business location.