Reader Kimaroo noticed that something was amiss with the with the single-serve bottle of maple syrup she receives with her French toast at Cracker Barrel. Not only did it seem smaller, she could have sworn that the bottle used to contain 100% maple syrup instead of “100% Pure Natural Syrup.” Fortunately, she had another bottle from a different Cracker Barrel visit stashed at home, and was able to compare the ingredients. Indeed, her maple syrup had been hit by the Grocery Sugar Ray: nearly half of its mapley goodness has been replaced with cane syrup.

I just wanted to alert you to another case of the Grocery Shrink Ray, but this time… at Cracker Barrel. When I eat French Toast at Cracker Barrel, I don’t use the syrup because it comes with powdered sugar and that is sweet enough for me. So I make a habit of bringing the syrup bottle home with me because we use it later on other foods.

So tonight I went to Cracker Barrel and noticed that the syrup now says “100% Pure Natural Syrup” and while I was sitting there I could have sworn that it used to be 100% Maple Syrup, because, frankly, I wouldn’t bother saving tiny bottles of non-maple syrup.

I used part of the syrup at the table tonight, but I cleaned it up and brought it home to make sure that I wasn’t just seeing things or remembering wrong.

I brought out my little bottle from the pantry and we compared to the new bottle from tonight. The differences aren’t just the level of maple syrup! Shockingly the size has also shrank!

The differences are:

Old: 100% Pure Maple Syrup 1.7oz
New: 100% Pure Natural Syrup 55% Pure Maple Syrup / 45% Cane Syrup 1.5oz

I remember from a about 6 months ago, we happened to catch a peek in the kitchen. A large sign was posted that said “REMEMBER: EACH SYRUP COSTS $1.50, GIVE ONLY ONE” or something similar to that. I guess they couldn’t keep the syrup machine going without having to scale back in both quality and quantity.

Also, note that the word “Vermont” has been removed from the front label.

Having to scale back their syrup generosity is understandable, especially with rising syrup prices. At least they didn’t switch to maple-flavored sugar syrup years ago.

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