Vanilla

Preface

Vanilla is a legacy of Mexico, and like chocolate, another major global delicacy, it is the basis of many sweets, ice cream, and cola drinks. Vanilla flavor is appreciated in any concentration by most people all over the world. It represents a large market of almost a half billion Euros per year, with only a few countries producing the pods of this tropical orchid. An orchid with special demands for soil and climate, sensitive to pests and diseases, and because of its vegetative propagation it has little genetic variation in the producing areas. In addition, several of the major growing regions, such as Madagascar, are regularly hit by tropical storms. This makes vanilla a vulnerable crop, resulting in large yearly changes in price. Moreover, the green beans need an elaborate curing procedure, which results in the final product: the dark colored pods which contain a high amount of vanillin. This process is still not well understood, though of crucial importance for the vanilla flavor.

The supply issue obviously resulted in efforts to start production in other regions and even in greenhouses, or to alternatively look for other sources of vanillin. With the food and beverage industry as the major users, the preferred source is a natural one, which means production by other plants or microorganisms, including the microbial bioconversion of vanillin precursors. Vanillin is thus available as a pure chemical entity both of natural and synthetic origin, but the pure compound does not give the same flavor as obtained with vanilla pods, or extracts thereof. Because of the large differences in price between the different commodities, adulteration is not uncommon.

This very brief sketch of vanilla explains the diverse research in this field. This includes biotechnology aimed at finding novel production methods of vanillin, horticultural studies for improving yields and increasing the resistance of the plants, entomology for finding possible pollinators required in areas outside of the original habitat, studies on the chemistry and biochemistry of the curing process, and unfortunately also advanced analytical chemistry to be able to identify adulterations such as vanillin-spiked pods, and synthetic vanillin instead of natural vanillin.

This book gives an excellent overview of this field. All chapters are written by experts, each with many years of experience in their respective fields. This book shows the past, present, and future of vanilla, and with no doubt will serve for many years to come as the major comprehensive source of information on vanilla, the standard reference source for all who have interest in vanilla, such as producers, flavorists, researchers, and consumers.

Rob Verpoorte

Department of Pharmacognosy/Metabolomics Leiden University

Leiden, the Netherlands