Why Is Vanilla So Expensive? Every Flower Has to Be Pollinated by Hand

The plant is a climbing orchid native to Mexico and Central America, where a specific bee pollinates it. Transplanted elsewhere it flowers and sets no fruit at all, which frustrated growers for centuries after the plant was taken to other tropical regions. The solution was found in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Reunion, who devised a method of lifting the membrane separating the male and female parts with a thin stick and pressing them together with a thumb, which takes a few seconds and works reliably. That technique is still used unchanged, and every commercial pod outside Mexico is the result of somebody performing it individually.

Several features compound into an extremely labour-intensive crop:

• •Each flower opens for less than a day and must be pollinated that morning
• •A grower walks the whole plantation daily through a flowering season of weeks
• •Pods take eight or nine months on the vine before harvest
• •Each is picked individually at exactly the right stage
• •Curing takes a further three to six months of daily handling
• •Around five kilograms of green pods yield one kilogram of finished product

A freshly picked pod has almost no flavour and no smell, which surprises people, and everything that makes it valuable is developed afterwards. The pods are killed, typically by dipping in hot water, which stops their growth and triggers enzymes within the tissue. They are then sweated, being wrapped and held warm for days so those enzymes convert compounds stored in the pod into the aromatic ones. They are dried slowly in sun and shade over weeks, losing most of their weight. And they are conditioned in closed boxes for months, during which the aroma develops and deepens. The characteristic compound is produced during that process rather than being present in the growing fruit.

Production is concentrated to a degree that makes the market unstable. Madagascar supplies the large majority of the world's natural crop, with Indonesia, Uganda, Mexico, Papua New Guinea and a scattering of other tropical countries producing the rest, which means a cyclone crossing one region affects the global price directly. Growing is done overwhelmingly by smallholders on small plots, since the crop rewards attention rather than scale, and the labour is family labour. Theft of maturing pods is a serious problem that has pushed growers to harvest early, which produces inferior results and has damaged quality across whole seasons. Prices paid to growers are a small fraction of the final value, which is a standing grievance and the subject of several certification schemes.

The principal flavour compound is a single molecule that has been manufactured since 1874, originally from pine bark and later from other sources, and the great majority of what is consumed worldwide is made rather than grown. The synthetic version is chemically identical and is far cheaper by an enormous factor. What it lacks is everything else, since a cured pod contains several hundred other aromatic compounds in small quantities, and blind comparisons find that people distinguish the two readily in preparations where the flavour is prominent and not in heavily flavoured ones. Price volatility in the natural crop has been extreme, driven by cyclones in Madagascar, theft of ripening pods and speculation, with prices moving by factors of several within a few years.

The plant is an orchid whose natural pollinator lives only in Mexico, so elsewhere every flower is pollinated by hand on the single morning it opens, using a method devised by Edmond Albius in 1841. Pods take nine months to mature and three to six more to cure, and five kilograms of green pods yield one of finished product. A fresh pod has no flavour at all, since curing develops it.