Selling Maple Syrup

[The Jones Family Farm]

Hi everyone......I'm looking to expand our Maple Syrup from the simple 10-20 gallons this past couple of years to 150 gallons next year. We have plans of expanding that to over 800 gallons in the future. Our biggest concern is how to sell the syrup. We both work outside of the home and would not be able to spend time at the farmers market. We talked to a few local stores and they are more than willing to buy our syrup, but we live in the country and these stores are 15-40 (or more) miles away. The most they would go through is a case of 12 oz. bottles every month to 6 weeks. It doesn't seem worth the gas money to run to numerous stores at various times of the month to deliver produce. We've looked into selling the syrup in bulk, but at our level of production its simply not worth it. Our thoughts were to sell it to wholesalers who can distribute the syrup to multiple stores from their warehouse and we could simply deliver the cases of syrup to one location as they need it. Has anyone done this? Is the pricing much better than bulk? I'm assuming that if a 12 oz. bottle goes for around $8-9, then the wholesale price would be around $5-7?

Any other suggestions on selling syrup? We do plan on setting up a website as well. Is this expensive to do? Are website companies a hit or miss type of operation to get a good website established?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and support!