How a Maple Syrup Company’s Recipe for Success Includes Gemini and Edible Sparkles

My wife, Laura, and I met in grad school and worked in environmental advocacy for about a year, but Laura was unhappy working in an office. So, we decided to move our retirement plans up by 30 years. I’ve always had an affinity for Vermont, so we moved up here in 2000 and started a small organic veggie farm. After seven years, we realized even our modest ambitions were out of reach.

We owned about a thousand acres, and while much of it was mountainside and not suitable for farming, it was excellent for maple syrup. In 2009, we shifted to a purely agricultural operation, producing bulk maple syrup for packers. Then in 2016, we launched Runamok, our consumer-facing brand, and got incredible traction right out of the gate.

Pure maple syrup is freaking awesome, but the market was pretty crowded and commoditized. No one was really doing any branding, so we looked to differentiate through contemporary design and culinary innovation with things like infusions, barrel aging, and ultimately, Sparkle Syrup, which has edible mica that makes the syrup shimmery and fabulous. We launched that in 2020, right when society was shifting from buckling down to craving something fun, like this frivolous joy in a bottle.

We sell all over the country in thousands of stores as well as internationally, but as a small business, we have limited resources and need to grow with the tools at hand. That’s why AI is now so integral to my workflow. We are suddenly empowered to solve problems in a way we never were before.

We use Google Search Trends to give us a pulse on what consumers are craving in real time. By tracking what recipes, flavors, and ingredients are popping up across search, we can hone our content strategy to ensure what we're producing resonates with consumer search.

It also helps us refine our product detail pages by weaving in high-intent keywords that customers already use, improving discoverability and boosting organic performance. I’ve worked hard to encourage the rest of the team to experiment with these tools, too.

This technology is highly integral for us now. In the last year, 30% of our e-commerce sales came from Google Ads, with Performance Max campaigns performing best thanks to AI-powered capabilities like predictive bidding and channel allocation. We might be a little maple company in the hills of Vermont, but we’ve always been tech-forward. We’re all passionate about it here, and we’re excited to see how it continues to help our business grow.