Gerry Newman buys vanilla by the gallon. He's co-owner of Albemarle Baking Co., in Charlottesville, Va., and vanilla goes into everything from his cookies to pastry cream.
A few years ago, each 1-gallon bottle of organic, fair-trade vanilla set him back $64. Today, it's $245, more than Newman can comfortably stomach.
It's a global phenomenon, hitting pastry chefs and ice cream makers alike. Some have changed their recipes to use less vanilla. Newman has switched suppliers to find a cheaper product.
"It's not certified organic. It's not fair trade," he says. "There's a guilt I have over that, because we're talking about something that's all hand labor, and if these people aren't being treated fairly, it's really sad."
To understand the current vanilla crisis, this is the first thing to understand: It's one of the most labor-intensive foods on Earth.
Vanilla beans are the seeds of an orchid. It grows wild in Mexico, where its flowers are pollinated by birds and insects. Most of the world's vanilla now is grown in Madagascar, though, where those native pollinators don't exist. So it has to be done by hand. "Every flower of this orchid has to be fertilized by hand, with a little stick," says Jürg Brand, who runs a small vanilla business in Madagascar called Premium Spices.
And that's just the start of it.
After you harvest the seed pods, you soak each one in hot water, "and then you wrap it in woolen blankets for about 48 hours, and then you put it in a wooden box to sweat," Brand says. Later, the pods are laid out to dry in the sun, but for only one hour each day.
The whole process takes months. It's so time-consuming and labor-intensive that during the decade that preceded the recent run-up of prices, some farmers simply gave up. Prices for vanilla were so low, it just wasn't worth the effort. "A lot of farmers abandoned their plantations during this time," Brand says.
This brings us to the second factor in today's vanilla crisis. During that period of low prices, a lot of food companies were content to use a synthetic version of vanilla. This factory-made version is composed of a single chemical compound, vanillin, which is the main flavor compound in natural vanilla.
Synthetic vanillin is much cheaper than natural vanilla. On the list of ingredients of, say, packaged cookies, it may show up as vanillin or simply "artificial flavors."
The vanilla market began to flip when food companies noticed that consumers were avoiding foods with artificial flavors.
"Consumers are reading the labels much more, and they're demanding all natural, and even organic," says Craig Nielsen, co-owner of the company Nielsen-Massey, which makes vanilla the traditional way, from beans.
About three years ago, several huge companies, including Nestle and Hershey's, announced that they were shifting to natural ingredients. That means they now want vanilla from orchid seeds, not factories.
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