The Bittersweet Beginnings of Vanilla Cultivation Can Be Traced Back to the Far-Flung Isle of Réunion

A journey to the remote Indian Ocean island reveals the story behind the fragrant, delicious, ubiquitous spice—and the enslaved youth who made it a commercial success

June 2025

OPENER - Vanilla producer Bertrand Côme displays bound and dried vanilla beans for sale at his Réunion farm. The beans generally grow as long as 6 to 11 inches. — Vanilla producer Bertrand Côme displays bound and dried vanilla beans for sale at his Réunion farm. The beans generally grow as long as 6 to 11 inches. William Daniels

The flight from Paris to the island of Réunion, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, takes 11 hours, skirting the smoldering crater of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano before landing just shy of the water. But after disembarking at Roland Garros Airport—the pioneering French aviator was from Réunion—you find yourself in a tropical paradise with all the trappings of its motherland, with French wine and cheeses in its supermarkets and a boulangerie around every corner. Four hundred miles east of Madagascar, Réunion is a sort of Francophone Hawaii. It’s a magnet for adrenaline junkies, known for its 600 miles of marked hiking trails, its zip-line and white-water rafting adventures, its lava tube expeditions and perfectly cresting surfing waves, as well as the dubious distinction, from a few years ago, of registering the most fatal shark attacks in the world per capita. But beyond the plunging waterfalls and palm-tree-lined lagoons hides another story, about this far-flung former colonial outpost’s agricultural history and the beginnings, of all things, of the modern trade in vanilla—the supremely fragrant “bean” that is, among spices, second only to saffron in value on the global market.

In fact, the vanilla plant’s natural habitat is the tropical forests of Mexico, where native bees fertilize the big, blooming white orchids. The Aztecs, who considered the plant sacred, mixed its dried seedpods into a cold cocoa drink, chocolatl, as Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés discovered when he arrived at Tenochtitlán in the early 16th century. European aristocrats developed a taste for vanilla after it arrived from Spain’s colonies in the New World on ships loaded with looted gold and silver. Eventually, a variation on the Aztecs’ cocoa drink—now served hot, with added sugar and milk—took off across the Continent, soon spreading to the distant corners of the French Empire.

At about 4,300 feet above sea level, Bélouve Forest, at the center of Réunion Island, is considered a high-altitude tropical jungle. Bélouve has been described as the heart of the lush Réunion National Park. William Daniels

Map — Once called Bourbon Island, Réunion lies about 420 miles east of Madagascar. The tropical but mild climate mixed with high humidity, adequate rainfall and volcanic soils bolstered vanilla growth on the isles. *Smithsonian*; Bridgeman Images

I came to Réunion to explore the roots of vanilla’s ensuing global commercial success. I arrived at the beginning of the island’s Southern Hemisphere winter, after the torrential rains had subsided and before the July and August vacation rush. Fresh off the plane, I met Eric Jennings, an author and historian specializing in French colonial history, for lunch. “The arrival of vanilla beans and their consumption is tied to Europeans basically duplicating Indigenous drinks from Central America,” Jennings told me. The French fell particularly hard for vanilla, Jennings explained, mixing it into a growing variety of sweets, including a frozen custard (better known today as ice cream) that had been introduced by Catherine de’ Medici, according to legend, when she married the future King Henry II of France, in 1533. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson returned home from his stint as the second U.S. ambassador to France with such a love for vanilla ice cream that he had it served at what would later become the White House. (Jefferson’s handwritten recipe, based on that of French butler Adrien Petit, is among his official papers in the Library of Congress.)

Jennings, whose new book, Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean, will be published this summer, was visiting Réunion for the fifth International Vanilla Congress, a semi-regular gathering drawing botanists, agricultural engineers, plant geneticists, and vanilla growers, importers and distributors from around the world. Talks focused on subjects such as climate change, the vanilla genome and “vanilla market volatility.” In one presentation, a Ugandan vanilla grower showcased novel sustainable farming methods. In another, the French agricultural research and international development organization CIRAD led discussions on a hybrid strain of vanilla that is resistant to Fusarium oxysporum, the most common fungal blight threatening much of the world’s commercial crop.

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine June 2025 issue

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This article is a selection from the June 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Historian Eric Jennings at Toronto’s Allan Gardens. His new book on vanilla explores, in part, how one of the world’s most expensive crops became synonymous with “bland.” Lorne Bridgman

Jennings, a historian at the University of Toronto who spent a decade researching vanilla’s cultural history and its global economic spread, was one of the conference’s keynote speakers. His book is not the first history of vanilla, but it is the most academically rigorous, and at its center is an unlikely hero whose story, although well known in the industry, remains broadly overlooked.

Born on Réunion to enslaved parents in 1829, a child, whose mother died while giving birth, was known simply as Edmond—landowners didn’t give last names to those they enslaved. Edmond grew up on a small plantation, Bellevue, above the town of Sainte-Suzanne, on the island’s north coast.

The island was uninhabited when the Portuguese first set foot on it in the early 16th century. In 1642, the French claimed the island for Louis XIII. Worked by enslaved captives transported from Africa, Madagascar and South Asia, dense forests soon became thriving coffee and sugar plantations. Later, indentured workers from India and China took over the grueling cultivation. The melting-pot Creole cuisine and Creole language found on the island today are a legacy of these successive waves of forced labor, a cultural mix 400 years in the making.

By the early 19th century, enslaved people made up 70 percent of the island’s population. This was Edmond’s childhood world at Bellevue. The plantation’s owner, Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont, was said to have “treated him more like a son than a slave,” according to a letter written by Bellier-Beaumont’s friend, a local official and botanist named Auguste Mézières Lépervanche. Bellier-Beaumont himself wrote of his affection for Edmond in an 1861 letter to the Sainte-Suzanne justice of the peace. “[He] was my favorite, and always at my side.”

Bellier-Beaumont was a horticulturist with a passion for rare plants, and he taught Edmond from a young age the scientific names for the trees and plants he grew on the property—though he never taught him to read or write. In Bellevue’s garden was a single vine of Vanilla planifolia, native to Mexico, that Jennings believes descended from one of the first vanilla saplings to survive on the island, after a shipment arrived from Paris in 1822. By then, the French had been struggling for years to break the Spanish monopoly on what had become a lucrative spice, planting vanilla in the tropical outposts of their own empire. But with no natural pollinators, every attempt to produce beans had failed.

At Bellevue, Bellier-Beaumont’s vanilla vine grew beautiful flowers, but it never bore fruit. That all changed one day in 1841, when Edmond, then 12 years old, approached a blooming vanilla orchid and nimbly peeled back the lip of the flower to reveal the pollen inside. With the help of a needle or a sliver of wood (the historical record is unclear), he nudged back the rostellum, the thin membrane separating the male anther from the female stigma. Poking around further, he pressed the two parts together.

Months later, Bellier-Beaumont, accompanied by Edmond, was surprised to discover a green vanilla bean dangling from the spot where that flower had been. “Walking with my faithful companion, I noticed on the only vanilla plant I still had, a well tied bean,” Bellier-Beaumont wrote years later. “I was astonished and told him so. He said it was he who had pollinated the flower.”

Bellier-Beaumont was incredulous, but two or three days later he noticed another bean on the vine. Edmond now showed him what he’d done. “Vanilla in that period was only cultivated in a few amateur gardens as a plant of pure curiosity,” Mézières Lépervanche wrote. “Edmond, with the sagacity only a botanist can appreciate, was able to distinguish in the abnormal flower of the vanilla plant the organs of fertilization that are different from those of flowers in general and noticed very judiciously that the failure of the ovary resulted from the fact that the sexual organs were separated by a ‘veil,’ and he had the idea to lift it.”

A bronze memorial and statue designed by Réunion artist Jack Beng-Thi in Sainte-Suzanne honors Edmond Albius, who discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers by hand. William Daniels

Today, the vast majority of the world’s commercially cultivated vanilla plants are hand-pollinated using Edmond’s pioneering technique—le geste d’Edmond—Edmond’s gesture, as they took to calling it on Réunion. A skilled grower can pollinate 1,500 flowers in a day using his method; the process has yet to be mechanized.

After Edmond shared his discovery, Bellier-Beaumont paraded him proudly around the island, offering demonstrations to other plantation owners. “I have no way of proving it,” Jennings told me, “but I’ve wondered many times if Bellier-Beaumont didn’t charge attendance at these tours. Edmond gets all this attention projected on him and becomes a bit of a local star.”

Edmond’s technique was quickly adopted, enabling a new industry to take root. Soon two growers, Ernest Loupy and David de Floris, developed a system for more efficiently processing fresh green vanilla beans. Rather than simply leaving them out in the sun to dry, as was traditional in Mexico, they sped up the process by scalding fresh beans in hot water, to prevent them from ripening further, before drying them. Within 25 years of Edmond’s innovation, Jennings said, “Réunion becomes the global leader in vanilla.”

But with increased production—Réunion’s vanilla output more than tripled between 1860 and 1880—land and labor costs rose, too. And with a huge new market emerging in the United States following the introduction of soft drinks (Coca-Cola debuted in 1886) and ice-cream cones (invented in New York City in 1896), Réunion’s vanilla producers began looking to Madagascar, the much larger and less-developed French colony next door, as an alternative growing site.

Madagascar’s new vanilla growers found great success in the lush, humid northeast coast of the island, where the vines attached their aerial roots to shaded tree trunks and climbed toward the canopy. It didn’t take long for Madagascar to surpass Réunion as the new world capital of vanilla, a position it’s held since the early 20th century. And despite periods of political instability in Madagascar, which gained independence from France in 1960, as well as natural disasters, boom-and-bust growing cycles tied to market speculation, and competition from artificial vanillin—the lab-made iteration of vanilla’s main flavor component, first identified by a French scientist in 1858—some 80 percent of the world’s vanilla is still grown in Madagascar today.

Back on Réunion, Edmond’s story became the stuff of legend. Today multiple streets bear his name, as well as several schools on the island. In Sainte-Suzanne, where he grew up, two memorials commemorate his contribution to botanical history. Novels and a children’s comic book have embellished the details of his life. Of Bellevue itself, however, where Edmond pollinated that first vanilla orchid, nothing remains, the property largely reclaimed by the forest. Only a rudimentary monument on the side of a road stands to mark the site.

The mansion at Villèle was once home to a sugar cane plantation. Today it serves as a museum and memorial documenting the island’s colonial past. Hemis / Alamy

To get a sense of what Bellevue might have looked like, I spent an afternoon visiting Villèle, one of the island’s best-preserved historic plantations, which operates as a museum and memorial to slavery. The main plantation house, completed in 1788, was home to the Panon Desbassayns and Villèle families. The house sits perched on a hill above the sea, with cream trim, blue shutters and a manicured garden. “It’s a place of memory, where 470 slaves died, not from gunshots but exhaustion,” said my guide, Patrick Coukan, himself descended from enslaved workers on Réunion. On a wall in the entryway hung an enormous framed Desbassayns family tree extending across the centuries, tracing lines in Réunion and France. “The work of a slave was from three in the morning until nine at night,” Coukan continued. “The only vacation was when they slept.”

Farther inside, among antique furniture, Chinese porcelain and Baccarat crystal candelabras, iron shackles and framed plans for a transport ship, the Le Brookes, were displayed. “The biggest cemetery of Blacks, of slaves—where is that?” Coukan asked. “The ocean, the seas of the world.” The tour continued, leading around a corner. Above the Desbassayns’ dining room table hung a portrait of Edmond as an adult, posing in a white dinner jacket and bow tie, a vanilla vine in one hand. The image, completed in 1863, is a reproduction of a lithograph by a local artist, Antoine Roussin. “The inventor of the pollination of the vanilla flower,” Coukan said, pausing in front of the portrait. “Plenty filled their pockets from his invention.”

Though published reports claimed that Bellier-Beaumont rewarded Edmond for his discovery by granting his freedom, Jennings insists that never happened. Instead, he told me, Edmond remained in his master’s charge until December 20, 1848, when abolition arrived, freeing the island’s 62,000 enslaved people.

Edmond, emancipated at 19, took a last name for the first time, becoming Edmond Albius. (Albus is Latin for white, like the vanilla orchid.) He had hoped to secure a job as a cook on a ship bound for France, but instead he went to work in the home of a navy captain, earning 15 Francs per month and ten pints of rice per week, according to archival documents. One day in 1851, items were taken from his employer’s home. On August 19, Edmond was arrested. According to official records from the time, Edmond confessed to stealing “a pair of silver bracelets out of a Chinese casket, a small wallet and a silver chain.” The public records don’t include other incriminating evidence, making it impossible to know definitively whether Edmond was guilty. He was sentenced to five years of hard labor and forced to pay the costs of his trial.

Bellier-Beaumont pleaded for leniency, barraging the legal authorities with letters defending Edmond’s character. The frayed, yellowing letters are now contained in the Departmental Archives in Saint-Denis. “Edmond certainly has indisputable rights to public gratitude and government clemency,” he wrote in one letter, sent to the prosecutor general in 1855. “The country is indebted to him for a new branch of industry.”

Though Bellier-Beaumont succeeded in getting Edmond released that year after three years in prison, Edmond never benefited from the fortunes his innovation produced. He moved back to Sainte-Suzanne, working odd jobs in agriculture and as a stonemason and a cook. He never returned to vanilla production. In 1871, he married, but he was widowed five years later. He died alone in 1880 at the age of 51. “The very man who, at great profit to this colony, discovered how to pollinate vanilla flowers has died in the public hospital at Sainte-Suzanne,” read his perfunctory obituary in the local Réunion newspaper. “It was a destitute and miserable end.”

Réunion today is home to about 150 vanilla growers, a dramatic drop since the 1930s when several thousand blanketed the island. Each operates outside the global market, unable to keep pace with Madagascar and other fruitful vanilla-producing regions. Instead, Réunion growers almost exclusively serve a local and tourist clientele, marketing their pods as luxury goods.

Late one morning, on the edge of Sainte-Suzanne, I met Bertrand Côme, one such producer and an outspoken champion of Réunion vanilla. A native of the mountainous Vosges region of France, Côme came to Réunion as an agronomy student in 1987, completing a thesis on vanilla blights, and never left. “I fell in love with vanilla,” he said. “I fell in love with Réunion.”

The vanilla industry was already in crisis when he arrived. After Réunion’s cooperative of vanilla growers, for which he initially worked, failed in 1995, he helped create its replacement, Provanille, becoming its director. Today, Provanille operates as a sort of central processing facility, transforming green vanilla from local farmers into cured black beans. In 2009, Côme opened his own picturesque vanilla business, La Vanilleraie, a tourist attraction on a historic estate, Le Grand Hazier, dating back to the 1670s, and still active as a sugar plantation.

Old quarters that housed enslaved workers, now used as offices for a local agricultural organization, line the edge of the property. In front of the old plantation house, newly restored but not yet open to visitors, Côme planted vanilla vines on neat rows of trees facing the sea. Where ruined stables, also restored, had been, he built a gift shop, selling vanilla beans, vanilla-infused jams and rums, and house-made vanilla ice cream for consuming on the property. (Given the price and potency of vanilla beans, no Réunion producers offer tastings of pure vanilla on-site.)

Apart from one small yearly shipment to a boutique spice business in France, Côme sells all of his vanilla, around 300,000 dried beans annually, here in his shop. In 2024, he received 45,000 visitors, plenty enough to sell out, particularly in a challenging growing year when heavy rains and unusually high temperatures brought crop yields way down. “I had to close for a month because I didn’t have enough vanilla,” he said.

Côme collects vanilla beans at La Vanilleraie, his farm in Sainte-Suzanne, where he sells vanilla vinegar, rum jam, syrup and other vanilla-infused goodies. William Daniels

Côme demonstrates the method of échaudage, or scalding the green vanilla beans, immersing them in 145-degree water for three minutes, which prevents them from opening. — Côme demonstrates the method of *échaudage*, or scalding the green vanilla beans, immersing them in 145-degree water for three minutes, which prevents them from opening. William Daniels

Later, the vanilla beans dry in the sun for two weeks, followed by months of dehydrating the pods in the shade. Then the dried beans are enclosed in a teak maturation trunk for at least a year. William Daniels

Côme processes his own vanilla along with beans from some 25 other small growers across the island. When the fresh green beans come into his curing facility, open to visitors next door to the gift shop, Côme plunges them into 145-degree water for three minutes, to “kill” them—the échaudage, or scalding, part of the process—then wraps them in towels to steam for a day. From there they’re laid outside in wood racks to dry in the sun for two weeks, then transferred to wire racks inside, where they continue to dry out for a couple more months. Finally, they’re sealed up in teak trunks for another year or so to “finish developing the aroma,” Côme explained. Every batch is regularly checked and sorted to ensure no mold has developed. “Vanilla is not a lazy job.”

Unusually, Côme marks the particular provenance of his vanilla beans—the location on the island where each batch was grown—which he sells at a premium in his shop, at €20 for a tube of three beans. Just as winemakers talk of “terroir,” how the soil and location of the grapevines affect a wine’s flavor, Côme is convinced vanilla has similar nuances. The notion is novel, and controversial. Côme told me, “When I was at Provanille, all the growers were against it. They said, ‘If I have bad terroir, my vanilla isn’t going to sell as well. I’ll have to charge less.’”

Côme hopes to back up his theories with science. He’s enlisted a graduate student from the Sorbonne in Paris to analyze the aromatic molecules in vanilla grown in different French territories—in Réunion, New Caledonia, Tahiti and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. His research is just beginning. “The aroma of vanilla has 180 different molecules,” Côme said. “The most important being vanillin, but there are plenty of others. It’s this diversity that accounts for its particular taste.”

More than 5,800 miles away, in Paris, an exotic spice shop offers vanilla products—including Côme’s—from all over the world tucked inside its Vanilla Cellar, the Cave à Vanilles. William Daniels

Côme is not alone among Réunion’s producers in striving to find—and sell—vanilla’s distinctive if as yet unrecognized qualities. Louis Leichnig is a veteran vanilla grower whose family has been on the island since the 18th century. One afternoon, we climbed into his pickup truck for an off-road excursion through his ancestral lands, which hug the Piton de la Fournaise volcano near the commune of Saint-Philippe.

Leichnig looks like a character out of a Rudyard Kipling story, with an unruly white beard and a machete and a pith helmet woven from dried screw pine leaves, a local handicraft material. He grows his vines deep in the forest among wild citrus and litchi trees. “This is an old plantation,” he said as we dug through the bush, the forest floor a knotted tangle of roots. All around us vanilla vines, drenched in light rain, climbed up palm trees.

Farmer Louis Leichnig inspects vanilla beans on his farm in the commune of Saint-Philippe, where most of his plants grow clinging to the tall trunks of red palm trees. William Daniels

Leichnig inspects green vanilla beans, which grow deep in the forest on lands his family has farmed since the 1700s. Today he specializes in “frosted” vanilla and other ultra-premium varieties. William Daniels

Hiking to the peak of Piton d’Anchaing is one draw for tourists. Réunion also offers remote beaches, volcanoes, pristine coral reefs and lush rainforests. William Daniels

With a long stick he pulled a vine off a tree, looping it back on itself before tying it to the tree again—a process known as bouclage. “We’re stressing the plant,” he said. “It wants to climb up there to reach the light. Here it’s humid. It will flower on these vines we brought down, and then we’ll pollinate them to have beans.”

More than 30 years ago, when he started processing green vanilla, curing techniques were closely guarded by a few dominant players. “It was almost colonial,” he said. “We didn’t have a recipe.”

Today, Leichnig specializes in ultra-premium vanilla, a distinctive range of dried beans made with his own proprietary curing techniques. For example, he sells “fresh” beans, a style he helped pioneer that are only partially dried, the additional water content making them extra plump. But his real focus is “frosted” vanilla—givrée in French—with such a high concentration of vanillin that big white crystals, sparkling like snowflakes, form along the outside of the bean as it dries. The crystals are a natural phenomenon, appearing unpredictably during the curing process, but Leichnig has mastered a technique, his own trade secret, for bringing them out every time. “We also buy with our eyes,” he explained. The frosted vanilla’s aromas were intense, the appearance quite striking, and Leichnig described its flavors when used in cooking as elegant and complex. “The whole history of vanilla comes from Réunion, and it continues,” he said. “It’s expensive to produce vanilla these days. We’re not competitive. So, we’re forced to deliver a different product—a product of quality.”

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The Bittersweet Beginnings of Vanilla Cultivation Can Be Traced Back to the Far-Flung Isle of Réunion

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