EUGENE, Ore., Dec. 8, 2020 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Starting in 2016, global vanilla prices skyrocketed when below-average harvests in Madagascar and Indonesia coincided with increased consumer demand for natural flavors and “clean” labels, notes Singing Dog Vanilla. What began as unusually high vanilla prices quickly became unsustainably high, with 2019 global  prices surpassing the value of silver ounce-for-ounce.

“While farmers reaped the benefit of spectacularly high prices for their vanilla crop, theft and violence became a problem causing farmers to hire security guards and sleep in their fields to prevent their green vanilla beans from being stolen at night,” says Bill Wiedmann, Co-founder of Singing Dog Vanilla.

The good news is that high vanilla prices also encouraged vanilla farmers to plant more vines and enticed new growers to enter the vanilla market. With a lag time of about 3 -4 years before newly planted vanilla orchid vines produce a good harvest, we now have an increased supply coming to market. This has resulted in a decline in prices from the stratospheric highs which caused problems for everyone in the supply chain. Vanilla is now trading at a price level that is attractive to farmers because it is a profitable crop for them to grow but does not attract theft.