If vanilla is not hand pollinated enough via the proper bourbon vanilla method, the beans on their vines have more shorts (pods with more results at sub-12cm.) If farmers are doing the bourbon curing method well enough, and not forgetting to pollinate all the flowers by hand, the resulting pods come in more elongated when fully ripe, and end up longer and with a more matured vanillin profile. Shorts still have vanillin to what usually amounts to the same density per volume of the pod, and some customers prefer short vanilla or believe it will save cost. Many end users or distributors even try to maximize the bean count by ONLY buying shorts in order to maximize the vanilla pods per pound. Keep in mind that vanillin is not the only flavor agent in the profile of a vanilla fragrance. There are over 200 other factors. Vanillin is the base note and “lace” that chemists can attempt to optimize for, but that alone can be featureless in fragrance. MVC staff internally do not like the taste of shorts as much as the standard 13-18cm median pods that result from proper bourbon pollination, but these beans still represent a sizable tonnage of Madagascar’s annual export.

The real vanilla curing process takes place on either side of the massive Masoala and Makira forest corridors in Madagascar, which as host to 6,000 of the 12,000 species of Madagascar plants have an incredibly excellent climate to conduct the vanilla vine as if right out of the jungles of subtropical Mexico where the plant came from ages ago, an imported but not invasive species of massive flowering vine orchid from the Aztec ancestors. Madagascar’s labor costs are actually so low, in the range of $30-150 per month per household. that the cost modeling coupled with culture of vanilla artisanally subtly sculpting flavor has made it the world’s prime producer of all vanilla. While every vanilla company does lip service to the “we love farmers” relationships of the vanilla coast, none of them actually directly pay any vanilla farmers’ salaries and are as directly as principally possible incentivized to bargain the farmers’ prices down.

In fact, the comfortable fair trade living wage is calculated often around $6000 per household, which would mean 4 people working at the average wage in that household. Vanilla farms are started by remote bush farmers not by centralized vanilla companies 95% of the time, and the other 5% of the time negotiations on green vanilla market price still need to be made. Farmers of vanilla simply get as much cash per kg for green as they can, through collective unionized bargaining in groups (collectives) to individual croppers who purvey their vanilla along the Antalaha<>Vohemar road searching for the best price. The fair trade price for vanilla is always less than they actually make for it, and so they profit in fact more than a fair trade price.

The conflict of interest is so glaring here in Madagascar that generally “fair for life” just means suitable working conditions with sanitation and reasonable working hours audited for a few days every couple of years. Vanilla farmers in the countryside generally set the price in equilibrium with the demands of collectors and exporters. The fair for life price is almost always LOWER than the price that is paid per kg to farmers in Madagascar, and so the entire premise of FFL is generally a ruse when it runs its course, as 1% of all days of the year is any of it ever monitored (if even that.) It would not be hard within a day of any single certification of FFL to point out a breach in codes in any vanilla company, anywhere in the world, big and small. FFL is now cynically but correctly curtailed in believability by American consumers (and to a lesser extent, Europeans) who have already waken up to the racket since the mid 2000’s, after the coffee industry invented it to erect monopolies for rich families in central and south America.

Organic vanilla is also largely a dissonant term….All vanilla IS necessarily organic. Unlike other crops, it is not really possible to grow vanilla non-organically, plus pesticides rapidly destroy the natural lifespan and flavor and scent of the bean. Like fair-trade charade, organic labels were mainly initially invented by the coffee industry in Central America to establish monopolies at the exclusion of poorer farmers not able to get the papers for identical (or even inferior) products.

MVC group for example has all of the certification papers, but will be the first to deride how de-synchronized the real ground conditions parity to this practice in some European and American office is. It is not possible to have vanilla that’s not organically grown in Madagascar. The only difference is a paper. “Conventional” vanilla is indeed organic as well, and the problem is more conventional wisdom than conventional growing practices. We only have the organic certification papers in order to signal natural growing further to our customers. Albeit yes it’s also true that the vanilla is organic…but we and many participate in these ceremonial sticker awards as to check the box for multi-input organic products that need every ingredient to be certified like this. Some companies and customers in the global north require every single input to have its own paper organic certification.

Madagascar island produces the most vanilla. Within Madagascar, Probably the Dounia group near Maroansetra, who can do hundreds of tons, to excellent standards and all lot-tracked and quality-controlled, representing a significant portion of all Madagascar’s actual vanilla export. They do a great job with the tract of vineyards and vanilliers where also much of the island’s best vanilla comes from on the south side of the rainforest, and are some of the best and the biggest on the planet.

Outside of them, a few of the legacy exporters in SAVA do collectively a few hundred tons per annum as well, and have colluded since roughly a few decades ago after Madagascar independence…but these legacy exporter groups are steadily losing market share of old clients, and easily losing market share of newer demands and buyers due to the onset of the internet age, the new generation of children in Madagascar who have ambitions for their own vanilla empires, and to the fragmentation of supply into dozens or even hundreds of exporters during different times of the year.

MVC has helped train the setup of a vanilla farm and 2 larger plantations in Hawaii and Papua New Guinea before, and before some of our former staff quit to run customer service for Floribis or start their own vanilla boutique firms or artisanal collectors and exporters. Vanilla is learnable and with enough time and experience, the outside world may one day produce some fantastic traditionally cured vanillas as well. We even consulted for investors with excess of cash for how to do this in Sambava for sustainable community development while maximizing their margins. All the money in the world however doesn’t seem to make a difference frustratingly next to meaningful endemic and grassroots vanilla culture and human history integrated into practice however…As other origins do not have the culture (let alone soil and savvy) for vanilla that Madagascar and the Malagasy people do.

On the island, there is the sense of the spice that comes from being born literally playing in fields of vanilla vines and seas of sunning vanilla beans…Thus, the intractable factor which cannot be divorced from the island, the ingredient which makes the real best beans, is that the people live and breathe vanilla here, and it is their way of life and art, not an industry, to all these farmers and residents of the vanilla coast.

The Tahitian (Tahitensis) species does not typically ever grow in Madagascar, but excellent crops of this species can be found in the Pacific. For Planifolia species, still to this date, despite decades and surpluses of effort and investment, nobody can match Madagascar’s kaleidoscope of culture, conditions, and curing wisdom…or even taste remotely the same. Try it for yourself.

There is no reliable cyclical trend but the closest thing to that if you’re buying a large order would be in October and again in April, twice a year.

Also at the end of a boom cycle in global vanilla prices, after a crash, which tends to happen roughly once a decade.

Yes! If you don’t have time, we can make it for you and have decades of experience and customizability.

It depends on the triage. If a bean is 2 grams on the shorter end of the visible beans you see in supermarket, like TK 13cm range and NFN but grade A, there are more than if you have 5 gram beans in gourmet category of 20cm. Therefore the question has no set answer if you have no set request of vanilla triage.

Yes if the climate is right you can grow vanilla plants. We suggest starting with a vanilla terrarium or a few vine posts, but you’ll have to pay attention for 5+ years.

We are not allowed to export green vanilla vines to you without an expensive and extensive regime of authorizations on both sides.

We can train your farm and workforce how to use the bourbon pollination method and monitor quality and cutting time, but this requires a multi-year contract and audits and monitoring as well as pre-planting site surveys.

It’s supposed to be if done correctly and compliantly with nature and best flavor, 13 cm or more, and 20-35% moisture depending on the type you’d like.

More moisture looks nice and expands the aroma, at face value, but in the actual food you make brew or bake with it diminishes the impact and strength, as you are literally buying water weight for mere optics and appearances.

Still, the flavor expression is different with vanilla between this range, so it is also down to preference, as much as PR.

It is not safe nor stable to have vanilla over around 35% moisture. 30% is a better cap before you should be skeptical on whether you are being scammed.

Bourbon vanilla is created from the planifolia species of vanilla in the islands of the Indian Ocean, Madagascar, Reunion, Mayotte, Mauritius, or Comoros, and that is grown in the bourbon method, where a human uses a needle or blade to pollinate the vanilla flower manually. It is also necessarily vanilla cut at the right time from the vine when matured and aged ripe, killed with boiling water to begin browning the pods, and then cured with natural sun and shade, alternated and flipped in a field by human laborers. Bourbon vanilla has nothing to do with bourbon alcohol.