By Craig Cole
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Vanilla may seem like one of the most basic flavors, but keeping it on the menu is anything but simple. Much of the world’s natural vanilla comes from Madagascar, where increasingly erratic weather, cyclones and drought threaten a crop with an outsized role in the global food industry.
“If you want natural vanilla, there's an 80% chance that it comes from Madagascar,” Yuvraj Arora, president of the Taste division and Chief Commercial Officer at IFF, told Newsweek during a fireside chat at the publishing company's The Future of Food and Agriculture Forum in New York City.
Often derided as a simple, basic flavor, vanilla is actually a critical ingredient in the food industry, “one of the most important flavor tonalities,” explained Arora, which is why IFF has been working on securing a stable – and sustainable – supply of these aromatic seed pods since 2010.
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To deliver this, every step along the value chain matters, from farmers’ fields all the way to the grocery store shelf, the executive explained to the audience. “This is where I’m proud of the entire flavor industry,” said Arora. “We've all made investments in that area to make sure that we are able to … through education, through science, through agriscience, help the farmers,” so they can manage supply chain volatility and deal with the impacts of climate change.
He continued to address the top ic of climate volatility, saying, “Climate, predominantly, is disrupting agriculture, is disrupting the availability of all these ingredients or commodities, right? If you take cyclones in a place like Madagascar, if you take the excessive heat or excessive drought in West Africa, you take hurricanes in Florida,” all of this can limit the availability of critical ingredients like citrus, cocoa and, yes, even vanilla. Climate issues can also lead to armed conflicts, another problem that can impact ingredient availability.
Paradoxically, food-science companies are working on ways of delivering certain flavors without using the actual source material. Mirroring the work IFF has done in Madagascar with vanilla, Arora laid out the plan. “We have a citrus center in Lakeland, Florida, the heart of the citrus belt... And there, our technology teams came up with this innovation that we call IFF NEO, which is non-essential oils, which we were able to deliver citrus taste … whether it’s lime, lemon, grapefruit, tangerine, clementine [or] orange using our science and technology. And none of it derives any source from a citrus oil," he said.
With technology like this, farming issues and other supply-chain bottlenecks can be completely avoided. If you don’t need actual oranges to provide citrus flavor or real strawberries to make a shortcake, there’s no worry if you don’t have access to these fresh fruits.
Wars and weather, however, aren’t the only issues facing the food industry. Arora said consumers are looking to make healthier choices by cutting sugar, salt and fat while also taking in more protein, fiber and gut health-enhancing foods. Beyond that, “There is this widespread desire to have natural ingredients in your food, and depending on the country that you go to, the definition could be different,” he added.
Changing preferences and varying regulations around the world are other hurdles to overcome, as is the seemingly ever-increasing global population.
But whether flavors are real or created in a lab, it doesn’t matter if the foods they’re in don’t taste good. “Nutrition is not nutrition… if it’s not consumed, if it remains in the bottle or the box, right?” Underscoring this, he added, “Unless it tastes great, consumers are not going to have it."
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