Our Madagascar Vanilla Store is as simple as it sounds. – A group of sons and daughters of Madagascar vanilla farmers from the vanilla coast who decided to just sell the beans straight to you, and not just send them to mysterious middlemen on planes and ships.

Vanilla curing is an art honed over more than a century by the Bourbon French in the islands of Madagascar and its neighbor nations, and what started as a pollination technique to replace a rare symtbiotic insect turned into a “technology” of farming that paired with lifelong experience and nuance of climate, soil, and culture, and unbeatable enthusiasm and labor costs, make Madagascar THE name of the game in excellent vanilla.

There are more than 200 different factors that make flavor expression at the molecular level. Labs and science bluster and lecture about attempts to mimic the real vanilla taste for years, but all are terrible to the taste as soon as they are compared.

The vanillin molecule is also frustratingly furtive about concentrating insolvently, which means biologically it is impossible to have much of the actual crystal without all of the other elements in the plant matter of the bean in nature. Only 1-2% of a vanilla beans’ “personality” or “expression” is its vanillin. Just taste and try it. You’ll understand immediately…

So with years of French and English in American schools and studying abroad, we decided to just bring the vanilla directly to you and sell it ourselves.