Bakeries and ice cream shops at mercy of considerable increases in price of vanilla

Sky-high price of vanilla has shops scrambling A jump in the price of vanilla has bakeries and ice cream shops considering adapting recipes to remove the extract. Jordan Kanygin reports.

A staple flavour of ice cream and a common ingredient in baking has undergone a significant jump in price over recent years causing some business owners to question the value of offering vanilla.

“When I started my business in 2012, we were paying $50 a gallon for our all-natural vanilla extract,” said Billy Friley, owner of Village Ice Cream. “Now, we’re paying $550 US a gallon.”

“It’s gone higher than I ever imagined it could go.”

Friley says Village Vanilla Bean will remain a mainstay on the menu at his shops for the foreseeable future but the Magascar vanilla extract is no longer being used in the creation of other flavours. Should the price of vanilla beans and paste continue its upward trajectory of late, Village Ice Cream could potentially limit its vanilla runs.

“If it gets to a point where it’s too expensive, it could get to a point where we would run limited production of vanilla,” said Friley. “Depending on how expensive it gets, we might have to make some drastic decisions and it could get to the point when there just isn’t supply for small businesses like us.”

According to Friley, the price increase for all-natural vanilla, an ingredient in a multitude of products, is tied to increased demand from major industrial food manufacturers.

Over the last few years, the price of a single vanilla bean has jumped from around $3 to roughly $6 and the going rate for four litres of vanilla paste has gone from approximately $180 and now exceeds $600.

Tanya Pridge, the owner of Cake Bake Shoppe in McKenzie Towne, says her business, which relies heavily on vanilla, is doing what it can to avoid raising prices.

“We’ve reexamined what we use the higher quality vanilla in,” said Pridge. “Anything baked, generally, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference and it won’t affect the quality. One thing that we do use the higher quality vanilla in is our butter cream.”

“We don’t want to sacrifice the quality of our product.”

Pridge says her shop has faced price increases on nearly all ingredients in the four-and-a-half years she has been in business. “You just kind of go with the flow and make adjustments where you can. That’s really all you can do.”

With files from CTV’s Jordan Kanygin