On vanilla, and the hidden costs of luxury

Bittersweet truths about how our daily pleasures depend upon invisible dynamics of power and precarity

I still remember the first time I saw real vanilla beans: April 2015, in Lombok, Indonesia, after a short hike down from swimming in a waterfall. My friend and I were cooling off in the banana leaf shade when a man approached us from the bottom of the hill. He held up a thick bundle of vanilla beans, their crooked brown tips curled stiffly around each other like the raffia ends tying them together. 

I was fascinated by these dark, shiny pods, already bursting with smoky fragrance. By this time I’d reached comfortable fluency in Indonesian, but not in the inquiry I’ve only just begun to practice. Where was this grown? Was this man a farmer or a middle-man? What does a life selling local vanilla to stray foreigners look like? If he hadn’t found us, who would be buying his beans? I wished I’d asked these questions then.

Before this encounter, I had only ever known vanilla as the dark liquid gold that came in doll-sized bottles from fancy import stores. Growing up, I watched my mother measure tiny, careful drops into her cake batters and catalogued it as a Precious Substance That Was Not to Be Fucked With, like the packet of saffron threads she hoarded from trips to India.

I don’t remember how much the man in Lombok was asking for his vanilla—only that it was low enough that we considered it. But as two teachers living off an abundance of cheap, good street food, neither of us had much use for vanilla, beans or otherwise.

Little did we know just what a bargain we’d passed up. That same year, as major food producers like Hershey’s, Kraft, and Nestlé pledged to remove artificial flavours like synthetic vanilla from their products, the price of vanilla jumped from under $25 to $100 USD per kilogram. The following year, it rose to $400 after drought conditions in vanilla-producing countries like Madagascar led to a global vanilla supply shortage.  

Source: Cook’s Illustrated.

In food media, the narrative focuses largely on the impact of these prices on the food industry ecosystem. How businesses like restaurants, bakeries, confectionaries, and ice cream makers are forced to make hard decisions about passing the growing cost of ingredients onto consumers or switching to artificial flavouring. 

But the more I learn about vanilla, the more I wonder about the other end of the supply chain. About the man in Lombok selling one of the world’s most volatile commodities. About how a farmer makes a living off goods that can fetch $600 a kilo one week and $20 the next. About the increasingly volatile climate conditions impacting farm labourers’ ability to survive. 

It’s truly wild to me how vanilla remains anonymous in our cultural understanding of food. We speak of it as plain, bland, boring, basic; the absence of flavour and excitement; a shorthand for quotidian sex.

This linguistic sleight of hand allows us to ignore the complexities and injustices bound up in vanilla production. This ignorance extends to so much of our food system, which depends upon the invisible labour of communities most vulnerable to the twin shocks of climate disaster and market volatility, where the difficult realities of agriculture are wilfully obscured by marketing and convenience. 

To speak of vanilla is to speak of power. Who has the power to set its price, to determine its value? Who gets to enjoy it? When we reach for that bottle of extract, we're grasping the end of a long chain of labour, exploitation, and environmental impact.

But first: what is vanilla?

In the past two decades, the cost of vanilla has ranged from $20 to $600 a kilogram. Source: FoodUnfolded.

We think we know vanilla. Sugar and spice and everything nice; the yang to chocolate’s yin. 

Vanilla is in everything from chocolate to Coca-Cola; anything with dairy in it; anything that’s coming for dairy’s job; and that one bottle of flavoured vodka someone brought to your house party in 2017. It flavours two percent of all food products in the United States, and three percent of all beverages. 

Often, these products come adorned with a little picture of the vanilla bean, artfully arranged alongside a tropical bloom that we assume is a vanilla flower, probably?—not that you’d know. In reality, the vast majority of food products are flavoured with artificial vanilla, or vanillin, a flavour compound that occurs naturally in vanilla beans, but is most often synthetically derived.¹

Vanillin is what most of us recognise as “vanilla”. But it only makes up 1-2 percent of a good quality bean’s total composition. Real vanilla is made up of hundreds of flavour compounds working in symphony to create distinct, nuanced flavour profiles in different varieties of beans. 

Like wine and honey, vanilla reflects its terroir. Vanilla from Madagascar, also known as Bourbon vanilla, is the ur-vanilla flavour profile: creamy, warm, rich, dreamy. In Mexico, the same species has a full-bodied, woody, and spicy sweetness, like cloves.

Also, vanilla isn’t a bean. Native to the forests of Mesoamerica, vanilla is the fruit of a pale yellow tropical orchid that climbs up tree trunks along sturdy zig-zag vines. There are more than 150 species of vanilla orchids in the world, but almost all commercial vanilla comes from one cultivar, Vanilla planifolia. 

Ripe vanilla pods at The Vanillerie in Kona, Hawai’i, nearly ready for harvest.

In ancient Mesoamerican culture, vanilla was sacred: a gift from the gods. For thousands of years, Mesoamerican tribes sourced wild vanilla from the forests, where it still grows abundantly. Ripe pods were ground and mixed with tree resin to perfume temples and valued medicinally to treat wounds, digestive problems, and lung disorders.

It’s likely vanilla was first cultivated by the Totonac people of Totonacapan, a region stretching from the coastal plains of Veracruz to Sierra Norte de Puebla, straddling the verdant valleys between the Río Cazones and Río Huitzilapan. When the Aztecs conquered the Totonacs, they discovered that adding vanilla to xocolatl, an energizing and frothy drink made of ground cacao, corn, and red clay, softened the bitterness of cacao and heightened its sweetness.² 

Labour of luxury: why vanilla is so precious

Fewer than 1 percent of all vanilla-flavoured products are made with real vanilla. This is because vanilla has always been one of the world’s rarest ingredients. A kilogram of vanilla currently costs about USD $200-400—second only to saffron, which can cost up to $10,000 a kilo.

Like saffron, vanilla’s high price tag reflects its laborious cultivation process, short harvesting cycle, and limited availability. Cultivating vanilla is an incredibly delicate art that resists mechanisation—every part of the process, from pollination to harvesting to curing, must be done by hand. 

Indonesian vanilla farmer Agustinus Daka uses a toothpick to pollinate each vanilla orchid by hand. Source: USAID.

Like a tragic damsel, the vanilla orchid takes up to two years to bloom, and just a few hours to die. Vanilla flowers only open once, blooming early in the morning, and must be pollinated before the heat of the day sets in to produce vanilla pods. 

Cortés brought vanilla back to Europe in the 1500s, but couldn’t successfully cultivate the plant away from its natural pollinators—tiny bees that evolved to pierce the protective membrane separating the flower’s stamen from the pistil, which can only be found in Mesoamerican forests. For centuries, the transplanted vines thwarted horticulturalists' efforts to grow vanilla beans. 

It wasn’t until 1841 that a 12-year-old boy named Edmond Albius, enslaved on a vanilla plantation in Réunion, figured out how to coax the pod into production. Still used today, his method involves inserting a stick or wooden needle into the flower to lift the membrane, creating an opening for the grower’s thumb to brush the sticky pollen mass into the female stigma. 

Botanists call this “the marriage.” If done correctly, as author Sarah Lohman writes in her book Eight Flavors, “the thick green base of the flower swells almost immediately. The swollen base matures into a green fingerlike seedpod—a fruit—that ripens yellow and eventually splits at the end.”

Like a baby incubating in a long green womb, the pollinated pod remains on the vine for nine months to reach full size and develop its full flavour profile. Still green once harvested, vanilla then undergoes a full spa treatment to induce fermentation, first by plunging the pods in hot water and then tucking them in blankets and massaging them to sweat them out. Then they’re dried in the sun, tanning until they’re dark but still plump and fresh.

Madagascar: the island that perfumes the world

Women grading vanilla beans, Sambava, Madgascar, 2001. Photograph by Jonathan Talbot, World Resources Institute. Source: Lapham’s Quarterly.

Today, vanilla grows wherever there’s an abundance of tropical sunshine, thundering rainfall, and cheap labour: Indonesia, Tahiti, Uganda, Papua New Guinea. But eighty percent of the world’s vanilla is grown in the hilly rainforests of northeastern Madagascar. 

Vanilla is a major driver of Madagascar’s economy, accounting for fifteen percent of its total exports and five percent of its national GDP. In the northeastern Sava region, over eighty percent of farmers grow vanilla; most are smallholder, family-owned farms. Malagasy farmers don’t consume vanilla in their daily lives: it’s too expensive and viewed as purely for foreign consumption.

In March 2017, just as the vanilla crop had begun to flower, Madagascar was struck by Cyclone Enawo, the strongest storm to hit the island in thirteen years. Enawo killed more than 50 people, displaced hundreds of thousands more, and decimated around twenty percent of the island’s vanilla crop. The resulting shortage drove global vanilla prices up to record highs of $600 per kilogram. 

In the villages where vanilla is grown, these price fluctuations have massive consequences. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. Vanilla farmers preside over one of the world’s most valuable commodities, yet the legal minimum wage for farm labourers is eighteen cents per hour. 

Vanilla farmers have no influence on the global market price, but depend on the sale of their beans for an entire year’s income. Warehouses are protected by armoured security, and farmers sleep in the fields with machetes, guarding their crops from weather, disease, and theft. 

In a good year, farmers can afford to eat rice and potatoes. A year like 2016 means money for new mattresses, 4x4s, electricity generators, and schooling for kids. In a drought or flood year, farmers borrow money from middlemen and sacrifice their next harvest as collateral in order to feed their families. As reporter Monte Reel wrote in this fascinating piece on the economics of vanilla, “every boom and every bust slams [Madagascar] like a tropical storm. When prices peak, cash floods the villages. When prices fall, it drains away.”

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The story of vanilla is a microcosm of the ways we take our complex global food system for granted—and how much of it is hidden from our view. It illustrates how our daily pleasures are intricately linked to the livelihoods of labourers halfway across the world, and how vulnerable these lives are to both natural and market forces.

For consumers, a rise in the price of vanilla might translate to pausing in the grocery aisle on a $20 bottle of vanilla extract that cost $10 last year. We shake our fists at inflation, the economy, the government for our ballooning grocery bills—a pretty valid sentiment, all things considered. 

Again and again, I return to my encounter with the man in Lombok, this single interaction in an intricate global web of trade, colonialism, and environmental impact. Like Madagascar, Indonesia’s rural communities stand on the front lines of climate change. As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, crops like vanilla, and the people that depend on them, teeter on the brink of survival. How much longer can we reconcile our desire for affordable luxury while remaining blissfully unaware of how those price demands trickle back to labourers in the form of near-constant precarity? 

To appreciate vanilla is to grapple with all of these contradictions. Not just as an ingredient or a flavour, but as a product of the long shadow of colonialism that still shapes our world. Only then can we begin to imagine and work towards a food system that values the hands that tend the vines as much as the desires that drive our consumption.

1. Traditionally, vanillin is sourced either from petrochemicals, or from lignin, a by-product of wood pulp and industrial paper manufacturing. Consumer demand for natural products has also led to an increase in vanillin sourced naturally through fermentation of rice bran or corn sugar derivatives. The end result is identical to synthetically sourced vanillin but costs ten times more, largely thanks to the marketing power of the word “natural”.

2. As subjects of the Aztec Empire, the Totonacs were forced to pay tribute to the Aztecs in the form of thousands of vanilla beans. The scent of vanilla beans laid out to cure was so strong that Papantla, the capital city of Totonacapan, became known as the “city that perfumed the world.”