What to Know About the Real Canadian Maple Syrup Heist That Inspired The Sticky

Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Sticky.

A dark comedy series The Sticky, out on Amazon Prime Dec. 6, satirizes a real-life sticky situation: the so-called Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.

The theft a global strategic maple syrup preserve about two hours north of Montreal involved stealing about $18 million worth of maple syrup over several months in 2011 and 2012, making it one of the largest agricultural thefts ever.

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Here’s what to know about the maple syrup heist, why it happened, and how the series lampoons the whole debacle. 

How the maple syrup heist happened in real life

Quebec is the leading producer of maple syrup in the world. Similar to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Québec Maple Syrup Producers federation regulates the production of syrup to control its price, putting a quota on how much syrup would sell each year. Surplus syrup was stashed in a rented warehouse with just one security guard.

The federation’s power over the industry means not everyone who has trees that produce maple syrup can sell the goods. Many federation members were grandfathered in, descended from original founders. Prospective growers would have to be adopted into the system because of the quotas, and the waiting list took years to join. “Imagine how frustrating that is,” says Brendan Borrell, who wrote “Sticky Gold,” the 2013 Bloomberg Businessweek feature on the heist. “You have this backyard full of this resource that you’re growing and potentially could be producing every year, but this organization is not allowing you to do that.” In his feature, he describes the tensions between prospective growers and the federation as a “miniature Canadian Cold War.”

That didn’t stop people from trying, however. Borrell explains that the federation had undercover agents who would be on the lookout for roadside stands selling maple syrup and check on people with high electric bills because producing syrup from maple sap requires a lot of electricity.

Due to these frustrations, “a group of renegades opposed to the controls on the maple syrup market in Canada orchestrated the heist,” says Borrell.

In real life, the stolen barrels—weighing about 620 pounds each—were replaced with barrels of water following the end of the syrup season. 

How the maple syrup heist happens in The Sticky

Screenwriter Brian Donovan says The Sticky’s characters are not modeled after any actual people. He didn’t want to base the show on real characters because the heist involved people still alive, who committed crimes, and who may not want their stories told. As he explains his approach, “let’s not try to reproduce the truth. Let’s just be inspired by what happened and roll from there.”

In the show, the heist happens in a matter of hours. The fictional thieves plan to replace the barrels with lake water but run out of time and remove the maple syrup via suction, replacing it with water. And while The Sticky opens with a human body in the barrel of syrup, that didn’t happen in the 2012 heist.

In The Sticky, the thieves get into the warehouse via a security guard named Remy (Guillaume Cyr) who has been sneaking out one barrel a month. He is portrayed as someone living with his parents, trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, and frustrated by how his dad hovers over him all the time. His father even accidentally shows up in the middle of the heist, just to visit his son at work and spend more quality time with him. While it is true that someone on the inside—in reality, someone who was renting another part of the warehouse—helped carry out the heist, the character of Remy is totally fictional.

Another thief in the show is a woman named Ruth (Margo Martindale) who has trees she wants to tap in her backyard, and wants to bypass the federation’s limits and sell the syrup on the black market, in the U.S. Her husband is in a coma, and she needs money.

The aftermath of the real-life heist

The federation discovered the theft in July 2012 during a routine inventory of its warehouse. Police arrested at least 16 people.

The ringleader of the conspiracy, Richard Valliere, was found guilty of fraud, trafficking, and theft. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and faced more than $9 million in fines.

The federation still exists. It now stores maple syrup in a more secure facility. 

Borrell concludes, “It seems unlikely that another heist of this scale will ever happen again.