Speculation? Meteorology? Theft? Poor cultural practices? Unstable supply? Increased demand? By end of March this year there was said to be a shortage of real vanilla, one of the world's most desirable #. Prices were being quoted at US$600 per kilogram compared with US$540 for a similar weight of silver.
Yet two months earlier, as the new year began, industry source Food Processing, was reporting price and supply were stabilizing. A year before, main supplier Madagascar had been hot by a serious cyclone. Experts predicted one-third of the island's vanilla crop was destroyed. Yet the impact was not so heavy, according to Aust & Hachmann, a Quebec vanilla bean broker. Nevertheless, warned Food Processing, 'this is a market that has been notoriously unstable.'
So what happened to valued vanilla to create an alleged shortage and drive prices up? Possibly a bit of everything.
Vanilla is a strange, finickity and time-consuming crop to raise and prepare for market. It is derived from the only orchid species out of ten of thousands raised for anything but floral attributes. And while today the world's principal hub of culture is Madagascar, it originated a full hemisphere away.
Now officially Vanilla planifolia, it was previously--and more poetically--known as Vanilla fragrans. Native to Mexico, Central America, and northeastern South America it is, unusually for an orchid, a vigorous vine. The greenish-yellow blooms last but a single day. In their native habitat, these must be pollinated by melipone bees and certain species of hummingbirds. Perhaps just one in a hundred flowers will then form a bean-containing pod some twenty centimetres long.
The Aztecs of old Mexico knew it as tliloxchitl. Somehow and at some undetermined date, inhabitants of their empire discovered that the beans, initially flavourless, can be coaxed into producing the valued vanilla content over five or six months of blanching, sweating and careful drying. The finished product went to flavour chocolate drink of the lofty classes and military elite--chocolate produced by an equally complicated production.
It was the Spanish conquistadors who named it perhaps more pronounceably vainila, a diminutive of vaina, a pod, hence today's vanilla. It was they, or perhaps their women folk, who acquired a taste vainila (along with chocolate, but that's another story) from them the desirability spread around the globe.
Attempts to raise the vines elsewhere, however, were usually less than successful. Vanilla is remarkably specific in its requirements: a hot, humid tropical climate, protected from wind, at elevations up to 2,500 feet, with good drainage, adequate humus, and an annual rainfall 75 to 100 inches (up to 250 centimetres).
Plantations were established in Réunion, Java, Mauritius, Madagascar, Tahiti, the Seychelles, Tanzania (Zanzibar), Brazil, Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies but almost all lacked natural pollinators. The only answer was the excruciatingly slow and painstakingly hand pollination. in 1840s Edmond Albius, a former slave on the French island of Réunion, perfected a quick method but it remains labour-intensive and skilled.
Unsurprisingly then, true vanilla beans remain an inordinately expensive commodity, exceeded only by saffron. This attracted industrial chemists as far back as the mid-1800s. Vanillin, the crystalline component, was first isolated in 1858. While the discarded pods are used to produce vanilla extract, even this is no cheap source of the flavouring. While increased demand for "natural" flavourings has driven prices up many resort, perhaps unknowingly, to artificial or synthetic vanillin. Thanks to technical wizardry, this has been obtained from some varied sources as pine tree sap, clove oil, wood pulp lignin, waste paper pulp, oil of sassafras, and even coal tar. Such is the price of progress.
And so, around the world, vanilla has entered popular culture, even lending its name to a movie title, Vanilla Sky, and the description of personality--Larry Flynt claims that, "these days it's all vanilla sex for me." Ah well, as Katie Holmes has revealed, "I'm so spoiled--I must have a Starbucks vanilla latte every day."
Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.
Speculation? Meteorology? Theft? Poor cultural practices? Unstable supply? Increased demand? By end of March this year there was said to be a shortage of real vanilla, one of the world's most desirable #. Prices were being quoted at US$600 per kilogram compared with US$540 for a similar weight of silver.
Yet two months earlier, as the new year began, industry source Food Processing, was reporting price and supply were stabilizing. A year before, main supplier Madagascar had been hot by a serious cyclone. Experts predicted one-third of the island's vanilla crop was destroyed. Yet the impact was not so heavy, according to Aust & Hachmann, a Quebec vanilla bean broker. Nevertheless, warned Food Processing, 'this is a market that has been notoriously unstable.'
