In July 2012, Michel Gavreau was conducting a routine inspection of a maple syrup warehouse near Laurierville, Quebec.
He climbed up a stack of 600-pound barrels, expecting them to support his weight, but when he reached the top, he almost fell.
One of the barrels seemed unbalanced and when Gavreau peered inside, he realized it was empty. As it turned out, many of the surrounding drums were empty, too, and others had been filled with water, according to Vanity Fair’s 2016 reporting, which quoted spokeswoman for the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers Federation Caroline Cyr’s retelling of the story.
This marked the discovery of what came to be known as the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, a multi-year operation in which a ring of thieves siphoned syrup from thousands of barrels worth millions of dollars.
The heist inspired a new Prime Video series, “The Sticky” (Dec. 6), starring Margo Martindale as a syrup farmer about to have her land seized by the government.
The comedy-drama is only loosely based on the actual heist and in fact, none of the show’s protagonists are based on the real syrup thieves.
While “The Sticky” is “absolutely not the true story” of the heist, as the show’s trailer notes, the series does call fresh attention to one of the most unusual crimes in Canadian history.
Keep reading to learn more about the true story of the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.
Why would people steal maple syrup?
Maple syrup may seem like an odd target for a multimillion dollar heist, but the sweet commodity is big business in Canada.
Canada produces nearly three-quarters of the world’s pure maple syrup, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission.
Syrup harvests vary every year due to climate, tree disease and other factors. To meet the world’s demand for maple syrup, producers created a strategic reserve, where they can stockpile extra syrup in good years and draw from the surplus in bad years.
“In the States you have the strategic oil reserve,” Simon Trépanier, then general manager of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, now executive director, told The New York Times in 2012. “Mother Nature is not generous every year, so we have our own global strategic reserve.”
The strategic reserve allows producers to keep prices stable — and the prices are not insignificant.
Around the time of the heist, maple syrup was trading for $32 per gallon, or $1,800 per barrel, according to Bloomberg News. (By comparison, a gallon of crude oil in 2012 cost $2.66, according to Statista.)
Throughout the months-long heist, thieves stole syrup from more than 9,500 barrels, with a market value of more than $18 million CAD, or about $12 million USD in 2024.
At his trial, heist ringleader Richard Vallières said he sold the stolen syrup for $10 million CAD, making a personal profit of around $1 million CAD, or just over $700,000 USD today, according to BBC News.
“To steal that amount of maple syrup means you have to know the market,” Trépanier told Bloomberg.
How did the thieves pull it off?
In 2011, there was an especially large surplus of maple syrup, meaning that producers had to rent an additional warehouse to stockpile the additional supply.
Here, thieves saw an opportunity. They rented out another section of that extra warehouse under the guise of using it for a different business, which gave them access to the building, according to The New York Times.
Sometimes, the thieves would truck out drums of syrup from the warehouse by night and siphon them into their own barrels, then return the original barrels filled with water, according to Vanity Fair.
Later, the criminals found a way to drain syrup directly from the barrels in the warehouse, without having to cart them away and secretly return them. The syrup would then be trafficked to buyers outside Quebec who allegedly did not realize it had been stolen.
Incredibly, after the theft was discovered, more than 600 barrels of the stolen syrup were recovered in New Brunswick in October 2012, and was transported back to Quebec under police protection, NBC News reported.
At the time, Étienne St-Pierre, the owner of the New Brunswick export company where the syrup was found, said he had no idea that syrup had been stolen, telling police it had been sold to him by his usual suppliers in Quebec, according to NBC News.
However, it later emerged that St-Pierre was in on the scheme. He was found guilty in 2016 of fraud and trafficking stolen goods, per the CBC.
What happened to the criminals?
Twenty-six people were arrested in 2016 in connection with the maple syrup theft, according to the CBC.
A year later, in 2017, the heist’s ringleader, Richard Vallières, was sentenced to nearly eight years in prison and fined more than $9 million CAD, Reuters reported.
He appealed this ruling and had his fine reduced to about $1 million CAD. However, in 2022, Canada’s Supreme Court reversed this appeal, ruling that he should pay the full amount of the value of the syrup he stole, according to BBC News.
Vallières’ father, Raymond Vallières, was also in on the scheme, according to Canada’s Global News. He was sentenced to two years minus one day in jail and was required to pay about $10,000 CAD within one year.
Others sentenced for their involvement include syrup reseller Étienne St-Pierre, Avik Caron, whose wife partly owned the warehouse at the center of the heist, and Sébastien Jutras, a trucker who transported stolen syrup.
Jutras testified at trial that he occasionally collected money from buyers for Richard Vallières, saying he once picked up a shoebox full of money that “had to be $200,000,” Canada’s National Post reported in 2017.
He also shared how Vallières allegedly justified stealing large quantities of syrup from the FPAQ.
“He said, ‘Stealing from thieves is not stealing,’” Jutras testified.