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 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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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,...

A Vanilla Rival Rises from the Pacific: Papua New Guinea Takes on Madagascar