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Vanilla from 1'780 family farmers
This year, we're reintroducing vanilla from Madagascar to our range. The sharp increase in prices for this highly valued spice has made it difficult for us. But we have a local partner who shares our vision.
Jürg Brand knows Madagascar and is familiar with the difficulties in the vanilla trade. The Swiss native has lived in the African island state for years, where he runs the company Premium Spices.
His core product is vanilla, which he purchases directly from 1'780 family farmers from 73 different villages. Brand brings vanilla to Europe through PRONATEC, a Swiss company that holds a stake in his business.
Both companies pursue a vision similar to ours at gebana: More fairness in the countries of origin, creating as much value as possible locally and paying family farmers directly.
Brand travels to the villages with his team so that he can pay the families directly. They travel from the small town of Mananara on the east coast of Madagascar, which has only a single paved road leading through it, using a large off-road vehicle to reach the villages. The journey to the edge of the jungle is around 15 kilometres and takes up to 5 hours.
Once they reach the villages, Brand buys the pods, which are still green, from the family farmers. He and the families set the price each year in advance, based on the market prices.
The family farmers who supply our vanilla live on the edge or deeper within the jungle in Madagascar. Some of the roads to their villages hardly look like roads at all.
Swiss native Jürg Brand lives with his family in Madagascar and works closely with more than 1'700 family farmers who produce vanilla as well as black and pink pepper, cloves and cinnamon.
Pods are marked with a stamp
But because the price of vanilla has skyrocketed so much in recent years, the farmers' vanilla fields in Madagascar are increasingly targeted by thieves. For this reason, Brand only buys pods marked with a stamp. It's like a signature. If the signature and the seller don't match, Brand doesn't buy the pods.
But theft is less of an issue for the family farmers from the Mananara region, says Marco Steiner. Steiner is responsible for vanilla at PRONATEC in Switzerland.
There is a lower risk of theft there because the villages are very remote and far away from the main growing region around Sambava. What's more, some of the families' plots around Mananara are high up in the hills, often several hours' walking distance from the villages. Thieves would have to go to quite some lengths to steal here.
The fact that processing is carried out centrally also means that theft is less likely to occur, according to Steiner. Brand and his team bring the green pods to the company's own factory in Mananara. There is a police station in the building next door. That is a deterrent, says Steiner. Nevertheless, Premium Spices still has security staff on duty.
Even before the harvest, family farmers mark their pods with a stamp. It's like a signature they use to prove that the pods they are selling actually come from them.
Just like pollinating the flowers, marking the pods is done entirely by hand.
6 kilos of green pods to produce 1 kilo of vanilla
In the Mananara factory, the odourless green pods are then transformed into the aromatic spice using a complex process:
The employees of Premium Spices first wash the pods in hot water at 70 degrees and then wrap them in woollen blankets. The pods are left to sweat in the blankets for two days. After that, a six-week fermentation process begins.
During fermentation, employees unpack the pods every day, expose them to fresh air for a few hours and wrap them back up. Once fermentation is complete, the pods are allowed to dry for almost two months until their moisture content has been reduced to just 25 per cent.
Because the vanilla pods don't all reach the ideal moisture content at the same time, Premium Spices employees sort them by hand as they dry in the sun.
It takes 6 kilos of green pods to produce 1 kilo of the blackish brown, shiny vanilla pods that we see in the glass tubes. Our Madagascan vanilla, like most of our products, is available in a bulk package. But in this case, a bulk package is 100 grams per pack instead of several kilos, due to the price and the low weight of each pod.
You can pre-order vanilla from Madagascar in our online shop.
Sources
Vanilla – The hunt for the brown gold (ZDF documentary via our partner PRONATEC – only available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9VPse1tF30&ab_channel=NATOURALEWIESBADEN, accessed on 18 January 2023)
Vanilla (spice) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla, accessed on 18 January 2023)
Interview with Marco Steiner, PRONATEC