Our story

Our property has 4,500 taps in the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, in the town of St-Julien. Our sugar shack was built in 1989 and the property was developed for harvesting by Lise and Gérald, on the land that previously belonged to Grandpa Simoneau.

In the old days, Gérald had to boil the sap on a wood stove for hours, sometimes all night long, to get maple syrup.

Since 2018, their children Nathalie, Mylène and Joé took over harvesting on the property. The wood stove remained and the process evolved while maintaining as many traditional methods as possible to produce unique syrup, day in and day out.

Each spring, the whole family gets together to harvest nature’s bounty, and now the grandchildren participate too. We’re harvesting our syrup as sustainably as we can, so future generations can continue the tradition.

A pastry chef taking the lead

In 2014, the adventure began when Nathalie Simoneau, daughter of maple producers and a pastry chef with over 10 years of experience in major hotels and restaurants like Sofitel and Laurie Raphaël, launched the family property’s first maple syrup collection.

I sold maple syrup to my friends and they told me it was the best they’d ever tasted. So I decided to sell it!

Selling maple syrup wasn’t new; her mother, Lise, produced and sold maple products in different markets for years, while her father, Gérald, took care of the harvest. Nathalie and her sister, Mylène, worked with her nearly every weekend in the spring.

Nathalie’s love of baking grew out of a fondness for her mother’s desserts, which Lise prepared for every meal using maple syrup from the farm and wild fruit picked from the property: apples, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.

She developed a line of pure maple syrup products and baked goods sweetened exclusively with maple sugar.
In 2019, she opened a boutique and studio in Montreal that combined her two passions: the land and baking.

I’m passionate about agriculture. It’s what feeds us. At the maple farm and behind the stoves, I’m preserving and promoting tradition while trying to reduce our ecological footprint as much as possible.

For the history books

Chemin des 15 lots got its name many years ago from an agreement between the Saint-Julien and Saint-Jean-Baptiste-Vianney (now known as Vianney) parishes. The Saint-Julien parishioners who lived on these 15 plots of land had to take the road to go to church in the neighbouring town. The nickname stuck and we named our maple farm after it.