Vanilla prices souring businesses
Beans that cost $11 a pound a few years ago now selling for hundreds
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Ice cream, a longtime summer staple, may be in danger. The culprit? A shortage of vanilla beans.
Ice cream shops, bakeries and liquor producers rely on this simple flavor, but obtaining the ingredient is growing more difficult as prices rise astronomically. CBS News reported that the price was as low as $11 per pound in 2011; now the same amount and type costs upward of $200. Neil Klingman, a senior distiller for Wigle Whiskey on the North Side, pays between $400 and $500 for a pound of organic vanilla.
Leona’s Ice Cream Sandwiches in Wilkinsburg is in crisis mode. The problem isn’t only high costs — owner Katie Heldstab cannot obtain enough vanilla. She says that Nielsen-Massey, her supplier, allocated a set amount of vanilla for each client based on past purchases. Leona’s, which opened in 2014, has been rapidly growing, producing more ice cream and using up more vanilla. But the supplier won’t budge.
She tried to purchase from other sources with no success. She will not buy the synthetic product, which she believes would harm the ice cream’s quality.
Mrs. Heldstab said she will stop making vanilla ice cream, despite
March and damaged about 30 percent of the alreadytoo-small crop, according to Reuters.
A cheaper, synthetic vanilla substitute does exist, but many businesses — including Market Street Grocery, Downtown, Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream in Shadyside, Pittsburgh Ice Cream Co. and Wigle Whiskey — refuse to switch.
“We are trying to produce a premium product,” said Chad Townsend from Millie’s.
Chuck Page’s Page Dairy Mart on the South Side uses synthetic vanilla for its ice cream. That largely protects his business from the unstable economy of vanilla. But he does use natural vanilla for vanilla shakes. It produces “a really, really nice aftertaste,” he says. Given his limited use of the flavor, he has managed losses without raising prices.
“It’s not like I sell a zillion shakes a day.”
Most of the businesses the Post-Gazette spoke with will be absorbing the losses without raising prices.
Wigle Whiskey uses the most vanilla in its Landlocked Spiced Spirit, where 6 pounds of vanilla beans are used to flavor about 600 bottles. Once distilled, the spirit is soaked in the beans for three days. Mr. Klingman wonders whether soaking the spirit for five days but using fewer beans would produce the same flavor.
“We’re trying to get every ounce of flavor that we can out of the beans,” he says.
Chad Rapp of Market Street Grocery has turned to Tahitian beans. He uses vanilla only in baked goods, such as cakes and muffins, and syrups for their coffeebased drinks. In these products, the slight taste difference is hardly noticeable, keeping the quality consistent.
Nathan Holmes, from Pittsburgh Ice Cream Co., is switching to a new and cheaper breed of vanilla beans. The new supplier is in Mexico. He said that the quality was not as good, but the flavor was still excellent.
“At this point, we just have to get creative about how we use the vanilla bean,” Mr. Klingman said.