Redefining the Perfect Product
Exploring Vanilla's Potential in Western Colombia
Just two main roads pierce into Chocó, Colombia’s vast western Pacific region. A bird's eye view of this landscape shows lush swaths of green and blue and brown – rainforest, water, mud, and very little else.
Zooming in, most accounts of the place either dwell upon its Edenic natural beauty or its intense poverty, two viewpoints that are inextricably linked, but fail to provide a fair or nuanced understanding of the people who call it home. With little access to the country’s modern interior, many rural communities here rely upon what they are able to forage and produce to sustain their families, rarely with opportunities to explore more lucrative partnerships. But amidst the dense, rugged rainforests of Chocó, some of the land’s naturally occurring foliage presents a compelling opportunity for commerce, without the deforestation, commodification, and exploitation that typically come with it. Of particular interest, this area is one of very few in the world where endemic bees pollinate gorgeous, vining orchids with fragrant fruiting bodies that may eventually be hand-harvested, cured, and finished into one of the planet’s most prized spices.
Of all the ingredients that we take for granted, few earnestly reward reconsideration more than vanilla. Much of the conscientious counter-narrative against “plain vanilla” tropes is overplayed – curious eaters know that vanilla is anything but an unimaginative ice cream choice, and that the vast majority of vanilla consumed worldwide is synthetic, since authentic vanilla beans are the second-priciest spice on Earth. But beyond these acknowledgments, vanilla sustains seldom discussed, untapped potential, not only as a center-stage ingredient in complex cuisine, but as a viable source of income in regions lacking the development and infrastructure that are usually prerequisites for financial stability.
At Regalis, our obsession with exceptional ingredients has kept rare vanilla on our radar for years. We have had the opportunity to work with producers from Mexico, Madagascar, and New Guinea, and we recently reconnected with Carole Prouteau, a French entrepreneur with a strong background in agriculture, based in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2020, Carole launched AIA Source & Trade, a startup with the broad but critical mission of facilitating smallholder farmers’ access to global markets while heightening supply chain traceability from producer to end consumer. As Carole explains, “I created this company thinking that sometimes what producers need is only somebody to find the market that is open to reinterpreting the food supply chain, to supporting new supply chains to emerge.” This year, AIA’s primary focus is specialty coffee, an industry that represents over six-hundred-thousand farmers in Colombia alone, and many millions more worldwide. But with over ten years of experience working with rural communities in the Americas and Africa, Carole’s vision naturally encompasses other crops as well. She originally came to vanilla through her work with cocoa farmers in Nariño, after years of nostalgia for the ingredient from her upbringing in France.
“I’d been looking for vanilla [as a consumer] since I arrived in Colombia, and I was wondering if Colombia grew it. I wasn’t really aware that this was its endemic area,” she admits, going on to point out that very few Colombians know of vanilla’s history in the wild. The very farmer she met in Nariño only came to realize that his region produced vanilla after he attended a global chocolate convention in Paris, and smelled something familiar from his childhood. Following his nose, he was led to the Madagascar Vanilla stall. His fascination with vanilla crescendoed from that moment until 2017, when he and Carole crossed paths and laid the foundation for the work that AIA does today.
Reinterpreting the supply chain
Discussing wild Colombian vanilla immediately invokes a strange dichotomy: it is at the same time a novel departure from culinary norms, and the purest form of the ingredient that the world has to offer. From one perspective, foraged indigenous varieties are noteworthy for differing from the ubiquitous, skinny, vanilla planifolia that matches our collective expectations for a pantry item. While v. planifolia pods tend to be small and slim, with sweet, creamy, and hyperbolic aromatics, this Colombian vanilla can be up to triple the size, much plumper, with an immediately striking fragrant complexity that evokes spices such as anise and clove or delicate florals like jasmine and honeysuckle. When infused into a recipe, the flavors evoked are far more layered, piquant, and herbaceous than traditional vanilla, though the familiar essence cuts through enough for it to remain a worthy replacement. Whether enjoyed relatively simply or as a small facet of an elaborate preparation, this vanilla is gratifyingly distinct and inspiring. From an agri-historical perspective, however, globally underrepresented varieties like these are much more faithful to the earliest examples of vanilla, pre-homogenization.
With an overarching acknowledgment of vanilla’s bizarre history, it becomes easier to appreciate how the gap became so large between this plant’s natural disposition and its globally available iterations. As Carole reminds anyone with only modest familiarity on the subject, vanilla is endemic to Central America and northern South America. The spice that we cherish comes from the fruits of vanilla orchid flowers, which are typically picked just before fully ripening, then cured and dried before distribution. The earliest records of vanilla’s consumption date back to the Mayans, while the Totonacs of eastern Mexico appear to be the first to deliberately cultivate the flower. When the Aztecs conquered the Totonacs in the fifteenth century, they also claimed the empire’s vanilla, famously blending it with cacao for the ceremonial beverage, xocolatl, reserved only for nobles and warriors in particular circumstances. Vanilla was not transported across the Atlantic until the Spanish began bringing the dried pods back from Central America, eventually gaining popularity among royalty across the continent in the seventeenth century, largely thanks to Queen Victoria I’s enthusiasm for the sweets that one of her apothecaries made with them. But while the spice remained rare and wildly expensive to ship, vanilla was unknowable outside of aristocracies on either side of the ocean.
The modern association of vanilla with Madagascar is a product of French imperialists' choice to establish large plantations there in the nineteenth century, exploiting a discovery made by an enslaved child named Edmond Albius on another French-occupied island, Réunion. Prior to Edmond’s meticulous formulation of a manual technique to pollinate the blooming orchids, no one had been able to coax the vibrant, intoxicatingly fragrant fruits from these flowers outside of their native landscapes. Some had come relatively close, but relied upon procedures that were untenably expensive and inconsistent. With the triumph of Edmond Albius’s discovery, vanilla could be standardized, commercialized, and its slow climb in appeal amidst the elite accelerated to broader audiences. Still, hardly any spice is more complex or costly to cultivate. As the nineteenth-century progressed, demand outpaced supply, and throughout the twentieth-century, synthetic vanilla gradually replaced authentic vanilla in most finished products. Today, about 99% of all goods that claim vanilla flavors or fragrances have absolutely nothing to do with real vanilla orchids, but everything to do with vanillin (4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde), one among hundreds of organic compounds naturally occurring in real vanilla. Vanillin is quite easy to synthesize, whether by extracting from petrochemicals such as lignin (waste from wood pulp and paper manufacturing) or eugenol (found in clove oil), or from the ferulic acid found in rice bran. Notoriously, some vanillin has even been derived from castoreum, an unsettlingly fragrant secretion that adult beavers utilize to mark their territory.
Before becoming a multi-continental industry rife with fraud and dubious provenance, vanilla was only cultivated where it grew wild, pollinated by native bees, flies, and birds in Latin America. Today, botanists still debate precisely which insects gravitate toward which varieties of indigenous vanilla orchids, but it is believed that there are no fewer than nineteen aromatic varieties in the regions where Carole is presently focused, along Colombia’s Pacific coast. Since 2017, Carole has been collaborating with community leaders in this region, studying local strains and training foragers on how to effectively identify, process, and dry fruits that possess the aromatic potential to earn strong premiums in the market. But as reinforced through her extensive experience in other rural development projects, a phenomenal product is a prerequisite for successful business, but far from a guarantee.
Making this match
The department of Chocó stretches up Colombia’s western Pacific Coast and across the border with Panama, ending with a sliver of Atlantic Coast at its northern extremity. The vast majority of its population descends from enslaved and indigenous peoples that have been in the region for centuries. In 1993, Ley Setenta formally recognized these groups as a sovereign entity, guaranteeing protection of lands historically within their ancestries. This landmark achievement toward the recognition of this region’s historically marginalized and ostracized culture has been followed with few meaningful efforts to enfranchise Black and Indigenous Chocoans, scarcely providing opportunities to engage with the infrastructure and developmental options elsewhere in Colombia. Therefore, communities here most often tie their livelihoods to the land, whether through farming and foraging, or by facilitating the modest amount of environmental tourism that the region hosts each year. Although the extent of Chocó’s isolation is an intrinsic part of its identity, the lack of development also makes its residents incredibly vulnerable to poverty, health crises that would be eminently treatable elsewhere in the country, and unmediated violence. The precariousness of this situation has long been exacerbated by the presence of narco trafficking strongholds throughout the region. Lacking earnest options, this dynamic pushes many into the cultivation of coca for the cocaine trade, a challenging but reasonable arrangement in areas devoid of viable income alternatives, security, or partners able to exercise agency elsewhere.
Even as progress is made, challenges to sustain and amplify these partnerships remain. Carole currently works with two communities to produce wild vanilla – one south of the Department of Chocó, near the coastal city of Tumaco, the other in northern Chocó, near Tribugá. Both of these areas are remote, typically associated either with the movement of cocaine or the sustained presence of violent paramilitary groups competing for its control.
Carole is careful to neither gloss over or fixate on these facts – her work is built upon active collaboration, describing her role as “being a link between these communities that have very good products but can’t make a good match with actors in the market.” Carole sees herself and her mission with AIA as “making this match,” reminding us that the vast majority of people in these regions have no real, deliberate connection to the drug trade, and are eager to shift toward producing goods in which they can take pride and ownership.
To bring this to fruition, Carole spends considerable time with both of these communities. Compared to Tribugá, the journey to Tumaco is fairly straightforward – a flight from Bogotá to Medellín, a flight from Medellín to Tumaco, a one hour drive to the community of Las Barras. This is where Carole first saw a wild vanilla orchid vine wrapped around a cocoa tree, a beautifully apt illustration of the intrinsically synergistic relationship these two plants enjoy. Cocoa is the mainstream crop that this region is famous for, and there seems to be a fitting complement to the character of the vanilla that flourishes alongside of it, strong in flavor and texture, driven by anise, cloves, and candied spices that sit heavily on the palate. For two flights and a short drive, there is no doubt that this vanilla validates the trip.
In the north, however, the journey to the vanilla is longer, and at least one additional mode of transportation is required. First come the flights from Bogotá to Medellín, then to Nuquí, a small city with a minuscule airport that appears fairly close to Tribugá on a map, though getting from one to the other requires either a short trip by boat or a long and precarious hike through deep rainforest. Fortunately, once the shores of Tribugá are reached, vanilla is not far away. The journey is long, and the region’s scarcity of oil keeps travel costs infuriatingly high, but once the final leg of the trip is completed, Carole tells of wild, fragrant vines weaving through shrubbery within shouting distance of the sea. Foragers are still studying the orchids’ patterns, but have observed that they emerge in manchas poblacionales – concentrated population clusters that lead harvesters from fruit to fruit. This sinuous coastal vanilla has an airier aroma and taste, with floral brightness and bursts of honeysuckle lingering in its aftertaste. As with so many ingredients sourced near the sea, it is easy to convince oneself that the salty breeze imbues the finished ingredient with a levity impossible to replicate with traditional, estate-style planting. And though this lack of regimented cropping limits the volume that the community can guarantee each season, their confidence continues to grow, enabling them to find and harvest vanilla more efficiently, gradually finessing through the intrinsic obstacles towards successful agribusiness in this region.
How nature works, how humans work
It is by no means a panacea, but Carole’s work with AIA augments these communities’ agency and access to impactful market opportunities, capitalizing on the accessibility, sustainability, and culinary appeal of their wild vanilla. Though still relatively early in development, they are already seeing positive momentum. Between Tumaco and Tribugá, there are now over one hundred farmers involved in the project, refining the techniques and knowledge necessary to produce maximally aromatic vanilla beans and working toward propagation of varieties found especially desirable. This latter effort is still in its infancy, but if successful, it will truly catapult the region’s vanilla cultivation to a financially impactful level. Complex and unforgiving, this entails cutting roughly one meter of stem from an aromatic plant and grafting it onto the rootstock of another orchid, then waiting roughly two years and nine months for the new vines to bear fruit.
Whether foraged or propagated, all vanilla will undergo an exceptionally meticulous process of hand-massaging as it slowly dries over the course of months, ensuring each pod is as pliable, oily, and aromatic as possible. In tandem with its uniquely complex fragrance and flavor profile, these measures are critical toward establishing the quality reputation that Carole knows is necessary for the project’s long term success. Still, so much of the beauty of this vanilla is how purely it expresses the genuine, wild range of forms and flavors that its flower can yield, unencumbered with the rote, standardized expectations of highly manicured Vanilla planifolia. Its natural expression is precisely what makes this such an appealing and unique product to share with the world.
As Carole conveyed to us in conversation, “here, we hardly have a 100% pure variety [of vanilla], because that’s not how nature works. It’s how humans work.”
This observation, while pointedly relevant to the market singularity that her project’s products will occupy, is just as eloquently an acknowledgment of the enthusiasm that all of us at Regalis feel when we encounter exquisite, underrepresented foods all around the world. Wildness is not an eccentricity, it is the nature of these incredible ingredients that civilizations have been struggling to harness for centuries. As Carole later put it, “we have to re-define what is the perfect product,” and to do this, we must look beyond the systems that have compressed our global palate over generations of efficiency-oriented production, the same systems excluding communities that catalyze the world’s most poised and powerful supply chains.
In Chocó, redefining perfection on scales both small and large will be a fraught, complex process, but we are thrilled to see wild vanilla play a part.
