VANILLA MARKET REPORT: July, 2020
Relief at Last: Vanilla Prices Slide, Outlook Portends Further Declines Vanilla prices are dropping and we’ve reduced our prices to you. Three years of soaring prices that made vanilla more costly than silver have finally, definitively, ended. The question is how low...
Loky and Jao: The High Price of Cheap Vanilla
Loky Bemananjara and his neighbor Jao Quatorze grow vanilla off a rutted dirt road outside Sambava, in Madagascar’s prime vanilla region. We visit them often, to see how their vines are doing, and to try to understand the challenges they face. Two years...
Bloomberg Features Cook’s
Cook Flavoring Co. President Josephine Lochhead features prominently in this fascinating in-depth piece, Vanillanomics, in Bloomberg’s Business Week. Reported and written by journalist Monte Reel, Vanillanomics is a story about the wild economics of...
Boom and Bust: Vanilla’s Extraordinary Commodity Cycle and What to Expect Next
Vanilla is the world’s second most expensive spice, behind only saffron. It is notorious for price volatility. With our century of experience in vanilla, we hope to shed light on current high vanilla bean prices and what to expect next. A difficult crop, for starters ...
The Secret of a Great Bake
Baking is blend of science and art, which is why I love it. To bake well, master a few basic techniques to unleash your artistry. Step one is quality ingredients. I cannot stress enough the importance of good ingredients to a successful bake! Two basic...
VANILLA MARKET REPORT: A Spaghetti Western September 2019
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from our August trip to Madagascar: The Bad: Prices remain stratospheric, roughly $450 per kilo. The crop is short, and quality is down sharply from last year. The Ugly: Destructive harvesting and curing practices run rampant. U.S. and...
Vanilla Bean Seeds: A Troubling New Trend
We all love vanilla bean ice cream. It’s creamy, delicious and gourmet….right? Maybe. Vanilla ice cream is often sold in two varieties: French Vanilla and Vanilla Bean. The quality of the vanilla extracts or flavorings in these two ice creams can vary wildly,...
One Big Thing To Know About Regional Vanilla Bean Differences
Regional differences in vanilla beans and the pure vanilla extracts made from them boil down to a single variable: quality. A lot of confusion has arisen lately about mysterious flavor variations in vanillas from Indonesia, Uganda, Mexico, Madagascar, Tahiti,...
Customer Spotlight: Silva Brewing
Vanilla Beer: Like fine wine, but more romantic and complicated Beer and Vanilla. Who’d have thought they’d make a perfect couple? We had no idea until we stumbled upon Chuck Silva, a craft brewer here in our home town, a very pretty place called Paso Robles,...
Papua New Guinea Vanilla Market Report-March 2019
A Vanilla Rival Rises from the Pacific: Papua New Guinea Takes on Madagascar