Vanilla

Vanilla is the second-most expensive spice after saffron because growing the vanilla seed pods is very labour-intensive. Unlike most flowers, pollination for vanilla flowers are conducted manually, so thousands and thousands of flowers, each of them, are hand pollinated. Producing high quality vanilla beans starts form harvesting mature vanilla pods, which is conducted by hand-picking the vanilla pods. The next step is the curing process, which is also very vital in order to produce high quality vanilla beans (high in vanillin content and fully developed flavour and aroma). The curing process itself can take 2-3 months before the vanilla beans are ready for distribution.

Global demand on vanilla beans is very high, and this past few years, there has been a big gap between supply vs demand that has caused price of vanilla beans to sky rocket to a point where it is impossible for us to accommodate the price increase in order to sustain the consistency of our supply ability.  Therefore, these past few years, we have been focusing on growing our own vanilla at our own farm. In terms of integrated and centralized vanilla farm in one location, we believe our farm is one of the largest in Indonesia. We are very excited with the result so far. We expect to start harvesting the vanilla very soon.

Harvesting vanilla beans from our own farm, means a full complete control over the quality of our vanilla. We have been doing our own unique curing process and we are very proud of the quality achieved from this curing process. Having to grow, and soon harvesting our own vanilla, will be another important milestone of growth for our vanilla program, which is, stronger consistency in supply capacity and in providing high quality vanilla products.