We consider this site a celebration of vanilla, or maybe just a scrapbook where we can collect our thoughts and information that we'd like to share. Vanilla is an amazing plant with some fascinating stories to tell. Vanilla can tell share interesting stories about its history, its chemistry,its biology, and its complexity.

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 Probably the most amazing thing about vanilla is how much it's underappreciated and misunderstood. After centuries of being one of the most sought after flavors in the world, vanilla's a bit of an underdog today. You know the story, “plain old vanilla.”

 

I first started admiring vanilla over 25 years ago when I attended the famous Penn State Ice Cream Short Course. We had a wonderful class taught by the David Michael company. I found it fascinating. A few years later, I was very fortunate to be invited to a class on the McCormick campus. There was a week-long class where they taught us all about vanilla, its flavor components, and how did it perform sensory evaluations on vanilla. We were even given special samples we could take home that would demonstrate different flavor attributes that were found in vanilla. This was a great way to learn about vanilla's complexity and  flavor attributes.

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The idea of creating this website really came from my daughter. She's my partner in this venture. Genna is a plant biologist who is passionate about many things. She called me one day with an idea. She wanted to give a very special gift out to all of the guests at her wedding. At first she couldn't think of anything that really seemed special. Then she called and asked, if I could help her get some vanilla, knowing that I have ties in the industry.

We were both very excited about the project from the beginning. But, we soon decided that sourcing our own beans and producing our own vanilla was the only way to go for her wedding project. Soon, we realized that there were thousands of people all over the world that were interested in getting beans and doing their own vanilla projects.

We both read everything we could find for months. There's a ton of information out there. But we were a little frustrated because the information is all over the board. Sometimes, it's hard to sort the good information from the bad. There is just so much.

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We hope you spend a little bit of time on our website. We hope you enjoy some of the stories vanilla has to tell as well as some of the stories we have to tell about our experiences. Thank you.