The outside of Big Tree Maple, located in Lakewood, and one of their sap tanker trucks. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse
LAKEWOOD — Lloyd Munsee, owner of Big Tree Maple in Lakewood, has seen many different changes in the maple production business since he first began producing maple products.
Big Tree Maple began as a back porch business in 1993, and Munsee has expanded every year. He currently runs the business with his son, David, and the business consists of three separate parts. Big Tree Maple makes and sells maple syrup, is a part of the equipment dealership Lapierre, which Munsee said is a family name in Quebec, and the tanker trucks used to haul sap is also used to fill swimming pools in the summer.
Munsee said making maple syrup is a lot of work, isn’t easy, and is expensive, but added that there have been many changes in the business over the last few decades.
“There have been a lot of changes as there is with all agriculture,” Munsee said. “A few decades ago the majority of sap was collected and gathered in galvanized buckets. There was a process to collect from each one of those buckets and bring it to the truck or whatever they were transporting in.”
These days, Munsee said the maple industry has moved away from buckets and the majority of producers these days use plastic tubes and sometimes also vacuums, which now increase the volume of sap producers are able to collect from trees. This has also enabled producers to make a lot more syrup and grow their businesses.

Big Tree Maple’s reverse osmosis machine, a machine that allows producers to take most of the water out of the sap and produce more syrup. P-J photo by…
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