Will Wanish started helping his uncle, Jon, tap trees when he was 10-years-old. In 2019, at the age of 15-years-old, he decided he wanted to start his own maple syrup business.
The family, Todd (Dad), Heather (Mom), and Will set-out to build a syrup shed on their property. Will conducted research and knew he needed $30K for his first evaporator. He presented his business plan to the local Regional Business Fund, secured the loan, and made the purchase.
After three years, Will knew he wanted his business to be bigger. The family traveled to Vermont and signed a purchase agreement for a 4×16 Leader Evaporator (double the size of the original evaporator), along with a 12-post reverse osmosis. The shed was doubled in size and the new equipment was installed for the 2023 sap season.
Then, at the end of the 2024 sap season, a large woods was secured and necessary because of sales growth. The family purchased a cargo container (housing the releaser, vacuum pump, bulk tank, and plumbing for the pipeline home) for this new woods, placed it on a newly-developed road, and started hanging miles and miles of tubing. The woods development took almost the entire year up to the 2025 sap season. After digging a trench almost ¾ of a mile to the home base, the sap pumped directly from the woods into a silo and eliminated the need for trucking and hauling from the new site, which contains about 14,300 taps.
Today, Wanish Sugar Bush 100% pure maple syrup can be found in approximately 500 grocery stores in the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri—and as far west as Montana and Wyoming. The business has five distributors that deliver products to those stores on a regular basis.
