The history of the Madagascar Vanilla Company in the global vanilla value chain

Madagascar Vanilla Company customers span the scale and sale volume from small individual buyers and bakers, baristas, barmen, and businesses who consume, extract, scrape, or otherwise flavor with a few beans to a few tons at a time. As the internet blossomed and a thousand brands bloomed in the 2000s and 2010’s, MVC started shoving increasing numbers of mid-sized orders (several boxes and 10s or 100’s of kgs  at a time) to the proliferating army of home-based or lifestyle, amazon, and rakuten businesses that multiplied with the power of web 2.0, and accelerated after the integration of API processing such as stripe, shopify, and braintree.

Mega monoculture legacy buyers, who always did vanilla well, like Rodelle and McCormick and Watkins, started slipping in market share nevertheless and stepping aside or eroding margins after assaults from artisan extract and even bespoke tattooed bean sellers. Where as France commanded and colluded to obscure the chain of vanilla in the past, many senior French vanillionaires simply got too old and died, and then the anglophone internet started dominating the direction of vanilla prices and plane cargos.

The advent of short-video supremacy in the 2020’s, and pernicious permeation of it everywhere during covid further fractured the vanilla-selling landscape (or cyberscape)…and culinary content was carried by everyone everywhere in America and Asia…from the cooking vloggers to recipe raiders rambling around the world. 

All of these influencers or aspiring videographers also started promoting MVC beans white labeled on Youtube, Tiktok, Reels and more, while a rigorous if reasonably good-faithed revolution towards healthy and slow and more natural foods drove vanilla even faster. Always a luxury good and not necessity, vanilla as a natural ingredient for healthier food drove it further to the top of fine flavor flows.

Madagascar remained isolated and cutoff with expensive air tickets and worsening or cyclone-crushed roads, and the poor economy and strangle of the oligarchy running it under the exoskeleton of a central government left the non-digital world of Madagascar worse-off. The post-colonial era made vanilla an important source of foreign currency for the nation, and on the island dollars are stringently watched as they flow in, and vanilla as it flows out. Bureaucratically, both suffer a death of a million paper cuts, mostly in Tana the capital, as the gauntlet is run with sharks biting chunks off, each stage and step of the cash and cargo.

The last gasps of the monoculture in media and pop culture from movies to music coincided with a similar cambrian explosion of food and flavors and artisinal F&B – and the birth of a thousand brands and colossal numbers of e-commerce sellers on the supermarkets and internet of the world.  The rise of e-commerce and the fracturing and crystallization of internet content creation led to a thousand-fold increase in the number of vanilla extract makers and vanilla finished product makers in the west. At this point, MVC found itself supplying almost as many medium sized and small businesses as its large incumbent importers.

This may continue or contract into consolidation of some review-farmed amazon brands in the next decade or so, but though vanilla will be a continual staple flavor with Madagascar running its quality benchmark beat, nobody has ever been able to predict the commodity’s price year to year. There are now over 200 ways and labels/resellers to buy MVC vanilla at the retail and “several beans in a box or bag!” level. There are even 100+ different logos and labels that have been put on MVC beans as white label packs too in the US alone.

During the onset of green season, green vanilla typically starts too high in Nosy Be Komba and Ambanja since these places are closest to tourists and newest. The lowest green prices tend to kick off in the interior west of Mananara or north of Andapa. 

The wildest joker in the deck each year is the dynamic laws and legislature that surround vanilla taxes and treasury grabs in Tana  in an arms race to capture vanilla revenue..