Right, the natural barrier to a lot of these crimes is the difficulty of unloading that much product on the black market without attracting attention.
Organized crime won't have much problem, you mix it with other goods of the same type and offload them over a period of time.
Nuts go rancid.
1+ years refrigerated, 2+ frozen.
No, the hard part with Maple syrup is that there normally are only a handful of suppliers from some very limited regions. It's very hard to suddenly appear out of nowhere as a major seller of Maple syrup without any history to go with it.
That's why they suspect organized criminal groups--to get rid of large quantities, you need your own distribution channel. One guy working by himself isn't going to have that.