Call the cone hotline... vanilla crop has failed

A WORLDWIDE shortage of vanilla is threatening supplies of Britain’s most popular ice cream flavour.

Poor weather in Madagascar, where the pods are grown, have led to failed harvests and a price increase of 500 per cent in a year.

There are also allegations that food commodity middlemen are hoarding supplies in order to force up prices. As a result it is now the second most expensive spice in the world, after saffron.

Some British artisan ice cream producers say the situation is so bad that they have temporarily stopped making products with real vanilla.

The award-winning Oddono’s gelati chain told customers in a statement there was an ‘unprecedented shortage’ of vanilla pods. The company blamed ‘a few large middlemen keeping the stock and forcing prices even higher’.

Madagascar supplies about 80 per cent of the world’s pods. Production is highly labour intensive and extremely vulnerable to the weather. An outbreak of pneumonic plague in Madagascar has also infected 1,231 islanders and caused 124 deaths since the start of August.