

On its journey from the fields in Madagascar to your ice cream, sponge cake and chocolate, the vanilla plant is subjected to an intense process: it’s cured, dried and sometimes even oxidised.



Given the lengthy nature of vanilla production – it can take several weeks to go from plant to product – the majority of producers turn to synthetic alternatives (vanillin). Synthetic vanillins are generally produced using petrochemicals or wood pulp, and some in the industry consider them to be harmful to the environment. One such organisation is Swiss company Evolva, which has developed a way to brew vanillin from yeast - deemed a more sustainable source.



“We’re not sure why anybody who cares about sustainability and environmental progress would prefer that the food industry simply continues to source their [artificial vanillin] from chemical companies and paper mills,” says Stephan Herrera, the company’s vice president.



Using synthetic biology (synbio), scientists at Evolva edit the DNA of yeast, and through a fermentation process, force it to sythensise vanillin. It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course, and it’s not the first attempt to produce food using synbio. Biohackers are attempting to create a “real vegan” cheese, free of dairy. And biotech company Solazyme is fermenting “a native strain of microalgae” to produce “a lipid powder and a fat source” which could replace oils and eggs in bakery goods, according to a spokesperson.



In the case of vanillin though, synbio has courted media coverage and criticism. The environmental organisation Friends of the Earth (FoE) has urged the public to say no to synbio vanillin, referring to it as an “extreme form” of genetic engineering.



“Claims of sustainability for this technology are questionable at best,” says Dana Perls, food and technology campaigner at FoE. “We need regulations specific to these new technologies. We need safety assessments that can guarantee the absence of long-term health and ecological impacts.”

What about farmers?

Perls says that the potential impact of synbio technology won’t just be felt by consumers, but also by rural communities and smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on traditional vanilla production. Synbio organisms use sugar as a feedstock; not only is the sugar industry water-intensive, but removes land that would otherwise be used for food production.

“These problems will be exacerbated as this and other synbio applications using yeast, scale up to meet increasing demand,” says Perls. “The [areas] where vanilla beans are grown, may in turn be converted into industrial-scale plantations for sugar.”

According to Herrera, because Evolva is targeting the 99% of vanillin that is produced synthetically, its operations shouldn’t affect rural farmers. But given that it means only 1% of the market is vanillin that comes from seed pods, it can be argued that vanilla farmers could still be pushed out of the market. The 1% does currently have the backing of some established brands, though: Häagen-Dazs sources its flavouring from vanilla growers, and this year Hershey announced it will replace its artificial vanillin with natural vanilla.



However, a long-term concern of FoE is that if the price of vanilla increases, food producers will turn their back on vanillin extracted naturally and look elsewhere for cheaper options, such as Evolva’s. The further worry is that these may then be falsely labelled and marketed as “natural” .



“There is this notion that our vanillin will sneak its way into the food chain as ‘natural vanilla’,” says Herrera. “Our product will never be marketed to producers as ‘natural vanilla’ or ‘vanilla’ of any sort, full stop.”

What about taste?

Natural or not, not everyone is convinced that synthetic vanillins can ever match the real thing or will have any immediate impact on vanilla farmers. “Technology has proven quite successful for mass producing flavours and for lowering costs, but it has been considerably less successful at making flavours that are really good,” says Nathaniel Delafield, co-founder of Lafaza, a US spices company that partners with vanilla cooperatives in Madagascar. “For many people, a high-quality flavour at a good value is still preferable to an inferior flavour at a lower price.”

Delafield believes farmers can keep producing the tastiest vanilla and people and producers will be willing to buy it, knowing it has come from an ethical supply chain. In order for this to be sustained, farmers need support to ensure they can keep trading and get a fair price for their beans.

“They [the farmers] do need better access to training and materials so they can continue to sun-cure vanilla beans traditionally, because that is where so much of the economic value and quality of flavour is added to vanilla beans,” he adds. “We see a long-term demand for our products that is not going to disappear, regardless of technological innovations that may come along.”

This article was amended on 4 June 2015 to make clear that Solazyme’s Whole Algal Flour is not genetically engineered.



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