Vanilla: A Labor-Intensive Orchid

Fun Fact! According to Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, vanilla is sourced from the dried and cured fruit (pods) of the orchid Vanilla planifolia. It was first used by the Totonac and Olmec people in Mexico as a food and beverage flavor. Vanilla follows saffron as the most expensive spice, largely because growing its pods demands intense labor.

Away from its native range, vanilla has to be pollinated by hand, using a method refined in 1841 by a 12-year-old and still practiced today. Growers have a narrow window to work in, since cultivated flowers open for just eight hours. A successfully pollinated flower produces a pod in roughly 3 weeks, but the pod then needs about a year to ripen. Even then, vanilla’s characteristic aroma and flavor emerge only after the pod is dried and cured through steaming and fermentation.

Source: Vanilla. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Accessed October 21, 2026. https://www.kew.org/plants/vanilla