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It’s about to become the busiest time of the year for family-owned Ferrindino Maple LLC of Hampden, Massachusetts.
“Out of our roadside stand, we do a good portion of our sales going into Christmas,” said Andrew Ferrindino, co-founder of the business, during a late-fall tour of the sugarhouse and roadside stand at 284 Glendale Road.
Certified organic maple syrup, maple candy, maple sugar, jars of maple crème, pints of maple cremee- a soft-serve ice cream, packages of maple cremee cannoli, cartons of maple cotton candy, and for the holidays, select gift baskets, are all available on an honor system 24-7 in the small red building at the bottom of the family’s driveway.
Ferrindino Maple products are also available in select Big Y supermarkets throughout Western Massachusetts, and at Rice’s Fruit Farm and Fern Valley Market, both on Main Street in Wilbraham.
Their maple sugar, Ferrindino said, is a very popular purchase for holiday baking.
“You can substitute it, pretty much, in any recipe, you just use a bit more of it,” he advised, adding that maple sugar, not syrup, was the original product early colonists made from maple tree sap, as white sugar was “so hard to get” in colonial times.
The maple cremee and cremee-stuffed cannoli are also big sellers both at the roadside stand and other locations. Brooke Fernandes of Fern Valley Market said during an interview for the August issue of Go Local that both products quickly disappear from the market’s cooler as soon as they are stocked.
But it is the maple syrup, still cooked down every sugaring season on a wood-fired evaporator in the family’s red barn that is the heart of the business. It’s a labor of love, and one that, for Ferrindino, started when he was just a boy.
“Who doesn’t love maple syrup?” Ferrindino joked, adding he now puts it “in my coffee every morning.”
Back then, the family owned a home in Monson. Inspired by the maple syrup making he saw at a customer of his father’s landscaping business, Ferrindino tapped the Swamp Maple trees on his property and made his first batch of syrup when he was “about 10 or 11.”
That customer, who also owned a sheet metal business, actually made Ferrindino a boiling pan for his syrup-making efforts.
“When I first started, I was boiling on an outdoor cinderblock contraption. I made about five gallons of syrup,” Ferrindino shared.
In 2010, his parents, Jerry and Carrie, joined him in the syrup-making endeavor and began working on turning their son’s hobby into a business.
“I started the business with my father. We grew it together, and now it’s his,” Ferrindino, who now works several other businesses, said.
Ferrindino said he and his parents continued making syrup out of their Monson home until the F-4 tornado of 2011. His family, he shared, was among those who suffered significant property damage as a result of that storm and shortly after, they purchased the home in Hampden.
The first few years in Hampden, Ferrindino said the family reestablished their syrup- making business through arrangements with neighbors to tap maple trees along the roadside.
“We would go up to homeowners and ask permission… we had 600 buckets,” throughout the town, Ferrindino said.
A small shed on the family property served as the original sugarhouse, and syrup was still the main product. From there, Ferrindino said the family branched out into making maple candy and then sugar.
“The natural progression was to making maple sugar, it’s much like making maple candy,” Ferrindino explained.
About three years ago, Ferrindino said his father decided to try adding maple cremee, a kind of soft-serve ice cream, to their product mix.
“My father is more of a cook than me, all the secondary products are on him,” Ferrindino joked. “Maple cremee is more of a tradition in Canada, but we have our own recipe.”
In recent years, Ferrindino Maple has branched out to a more efficient tubing-based tree tapping system, working two sugarbushes – the term for a stand of maple trees – on leased land, one in Wilbraham and another on the 300-acre farm owned by Great Horse in Hampden. Their total annual tap is about 3,000 trees, which produces approximately 1,500 gallons of syrup.
“The average is 60 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup,” Ferrindino said, adding that the sap yield per tree changes throughout the collection season, as does the sugar content of the sap.
With partial funding from the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture, Ferrindino said his family’s business is also busy during this off-production season, putting the finishing touches on a new bottling and food production building just yards from their original 12-foot by 25-foot evaporator and production building.
“It was challenging to do it all” in this space, Ferrindino shared, showing off the farm’s osmosis extractor, which reduces the amount of water in the maple sap before processing, and the giant wood-fired extractor, surrounded by scores of steel barrels of syrup from the last sugaring season awaiting bottling in the original sugarhouse.
And though he may have been a driving force in starting the family in sugaring, Ferrindino said the business is now run by his father, his mother, who splits her time between an outside job and the sugar business, his cousin and one employee.
He said customers interested in seeing the sugaring operation in process should check Ferrindino’s Facebook at facebook.com/ferrindinomaple/ during January and February for their annual open house day.
“The season is shifting, and starts earlier now,” Ferrindino commented.
FERRINDINO MAPLE IS LOCATED AT 284 GLENDALE ROAD IN HAMPDEN.
FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO ORDER PRODUCTS ONLINE, VISIT FERRINDINO MAPLE AT FERRINDINO.COM
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