Fair Trade News

Published July 6, 2006

On the Side: Vanilla supplier learns to adapt


By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

The world's preeminent supplier of vanilla, as David Michael & Co. likes to call itself, is headquartered in a low-slung brick plant that could pass for an oversize elementary school in Philadelphia's Far Northeast, roughly a mile off Roosevelt Boulevard from the factory where Nabisco bakes its Oreo cookies.

The company traces its history back more than a century, having supplied customized vanilla extracts to the trade for so long it calls them David Michael Vanilla.

But these have not been easy times to be in the vanilla racket: "This gray hair," says David Michael's resident vanilla guru, Tim Webster, "was black six years ago."

Six years ago the lid blew off vanilla. Everything that could go wrong did: In Madagascar, where most of the world's beans are handpicked, a cyclone wiped out a third of the harvest. Vast stocks of stored beans were lost. Floods ruined Indonesia's haul.

Beans that once sold for $20 a kilo in 1999 peaked at $500 a kilo a year or two ago; bakers accustomed to paying $60 for a gallon of pure extract were suddenly facing invoices for $238.

It was one hair-graying ride. And last week, Webster, who's also David Michael's vice president for global business, was relieved to report that the worst seemed to be, well, if not over, then not as bad as it was.

Good news was that harvests (with new players that included Uganda and India) had climbed back to 1999 levels.

The bad news was that some of David Michael's industrial customers (concentrated in the ice cream, beverage, baking and confection sectors) had reformulated their recipes, dialing down the costly vanilla component. (Some, in fact, switched to cheaper imitation vanilla.)

In other words, the supply business (David Michael doesn't sell retail) had shifted shape. Which is one reason why last week, headquarters sent out word that it was offering - in addition to organic vanilla flavoring - the first fair-trade pure vanilla in the U.S. market.

The rationale of fair-trade certified crops is that small farmers certified as careful, environment-friendly growers are guaranteed a living wage even if global commodity prices plummet.

Further down the food chain (where fair-trade coffee has proved the big success), consumers can vote to support fair trade's social-justice ethos with their wallets; indeed, fair-trade vanilla - while a tiny part of finished products - is far costlier than the conventional beans.

But the fair-trade announcement was only the public face of change. Behind closed doors, the David Michael vanilla lab has been working at altering the desserts-only image of "the world's most popular flavor."

That has meant thinking beyond sweets to more savory applications - exploiting vanilla's structural affinity, for instance, for chemical compounds in pepper and chile, especially, says Webster, at "sub-threshold levels," a way of saying that you don't really taste the vanilla.

So far, the David Michael team has already demonstrated a marinade for pork tenderloin made with Kentucky bourbon and bourbon (referring to the former French island of Madagascar) vanilla. They've toyed with a classic vanilla-infused cream sauce for lobster and crab. Webster himself adds a dash to his homemade tomato salsa, cutting the acidity and rounding out the flavor.

Taking a note from Mexican cookery - where it shows up in shrimp saute and corn sauces for crabcakes - he envisions it in beef stew, gravy and soup, adding layers to traditional flavors without leaving a vanilla calling card.

So it goes in vanilla's post-crisis trenches, the old bean recast as silent background flavor and stand-up planet-saver, tall orders for a flavor whose first name - David Michael notwithstanding - has always been "plain."

Contact columnist Rick Nichols at 215-854-2715 or rnichols@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/ricknichols.