About Tropical Maine

The concept for the idea came in an "Aha!" moment one day in Hawai'i in the 1980’s where Jon Olsen was living. Having grown up in Maine, he remembers many spring days collecting sap and boiling it on the family wood stove. “The sweet smell filtered through the whole house,” he remembers, “and the natural maple flavor can’t be compared to mass-produced artificial pancake syrups that fill supermarket shelves.”  

After living in Hawai'i for many years and discovering the powerful, unique, exotic flavor of passion fruit (called lilikoi there)—ordinarily mixed with sugar since it is quite sour—that "aha!" moment came. After much experimentation to make it into a juice with the right proportions, he found just the right balance of sweetness and tropical piquancy.

After returning to Maine in the summer of 2001, the idea of combining his love of native Maine and Hawaii, where he lived for 35 years, kept percolating until sources for both the syrup and passion fruit were found. By early 2008, the first limited production of Tropical Maine Natural Syrup and Marinade took place and the effort was on to introduce a new flavor to an unsuspecting world. Just maple syrup and passion fruit—all natural, no “secret ingredients”!

Tropical Maine^TM is a unique proprietary blend of Maine maple syrup and passion fruit concentrate which is invented, produced, and marketed by Jon Olsen.

Just maple syrup and passion fruit—all natural, no “secret ingredients”!

Gradually, Jon learned to promote Tropical Maine to buying customers of retail markets by offering it directly to them in the form of taste-tests. The most common comment is a surprised and delighted "Wow!" or "Awesome!" and an occasional “What is this?”

Part of the fun is asking people to guess the two ingredients, which few people can guess correctly. The whole idea is to have fun and and to that end the company logo is a happy moose riding a wave on a surfboard.

Jon is also working on a frozen concentrate. Check back on the web site or check with retailers for news on this new product. Thanks for your interest in Tropical Maine!

 

“The natural maple flavor can’t be compared to mass-produced artificial pancake syrups that fill supermarket shelves.”