Few products are as closely tied to Canada as maple syrup, and the province of Québec alone supplies the great majority of the world's harvest each year. The syrup begins as a thin, faintly sweet sap that rises in the sugar maple during a brief window in early spring, when the days turn mild but the nights still drop below freezing. Long before Europeans reached the continent, Indigenous peoples were already collecting this sap and boiling it down over open fires, and it was they who showed the first settlers how the harvest was done.

Turning raw sap into finished syrup is slow, demanding work. A tree is tapped with a small spout, the sap is gathered, and then it is boiled for hours until almost all of the water has steamed away; roughly forty litres of sap yield a single litre of syrup. Where earlier producers hung a bucket on every tree, most now draw the sap through long networks of plastic tubing that run straight to the boiling house, and many pass it through machines that remove much of the water before the fire is even lit.