1/4 pound of vanilla beans from the most recent season in Madagascar. They are Grade A bourbon TK gourmet which is the top tier (and most expensive in the island itself due to expelling the “swell” of excess water weight fraud) and presents per pod far more flavor (and less empty water weight) and parity in vanillin, never molds, isn’t brittle or barky but waxy moist and beautiful, lasts with hermetic storage far longer, and is custom tattooed to track and triage provenance and prove quality and single origin. 

 

There are lots of seeds (caviar, those black specs) inside the beans. Both the bean and the caviar are flavorful and filled with the core taste vanilla has become famous for in everything from finished whiskeys to white ice cream speckled sundays, and the spice permeates the entire baking and dessert industry as the essential staple, the bass note of the taste orchestra in foods and beverages across the world. Nearly every person on earth has tasted vanilla flavor in the 21st century.

 

Planifolia is the species of vanilla in Madagascar. This is traditionally pollinated using the bourbon method by hand, and cured with natural sun and the art of vanilla coast culture. We take beans from Diana at the start of the season, Sava at the midswing, and Maroansetra and Mananara at the tail of the bloom. By June to September all the beans are collected and cured, and by the end of the year the export is in full swing and rains start in Madagascar while the vanilla is airlifted out of careful storage over to its far flung friends and flavor houses in the B2B and B2C siloes and sectors.

 

Vanilla exporters require a license in Madagascar, and if you come visit us you’ll see virtually nobody else here from foreign countries or outside vanilla companies who you find online purporting to sell and specialize in it. Vanilla importers typically use airports and paraffin wax paper to focus flavor. Once it is in the destination markets, everyone including MVC packs in vacuum and clean packs or aluminum sterile packs (for US and Asia standards) or other retail packaging 

 

The beans are from coastal and rainforest rim farms, integrated in floraculture with orchids on training posts to guide the vines or small trees serving to do the same, as well as agroforestry to integrate primary and secondary forest preservation. This is providing actual money and thus irrefutable motivation to actual vanilla farmers (not theoretical money nor aid to middling meddling admin and capital G.O. and N.G.O. rackets, or overreaching Tana lobby groups in Madagascar.) 

 

Our farmers and community make vastly more income from vanilla than the other crops in Madagascar that range from rice to ritual medicine, and profits accrue to the countryside for their own development without specious claims to false conservation or community projects absent of assurance and proof. For everyone in the MVC group the money and agriculture for our orchids is vertically integrated and politely positively policed, controlled and consulted down to the planting days, pollination timing, and people responsible for each round. Vanilla prices rise and fall as a commodity with supply in demand cycles in the wider world, but MVC is always the lowest price for the World’s Best Vanilla Beans and is ahead of that rate regression. 

 

For wholesale, price breaks of significant savings to you start at 11 pounds and above (write us.) If you ask us about conditions on the ground for vanilla, we are actually there and know firsthand. If you need a higher level of detail and delineation of the process of curing Madagascar vanilla, avoiding marketing and manipulative media, come visit us and we’ll host you.