- Vanilla ice cream lovers will need to pay more the flavour due to a shortage
- Pods produced in Madagascar for worldwide consumption destroyed in cyclone
- Flavour substitutes being used to replicate vanilla until stocks are replenished
Ice cream will cost more in Australia this summer thanks to an international shortage of vanilla.
The shortage is being blamed on a recent cyclone destroying farms in Madagascar that produce a third of vanilla beans for worldwide consumption – and it could take seven years for them to be regrown.
Retailers in the country are no longer stocking the original produce but have started resorting to substitutes that taste similar to the popular flavour, 7News reports.
Gelato Messina head chef Donato Toce told the television station that the company has started using a substitute which is ‘five times the strength of a normal vanilla essence’ and were paying dearly for it at $2,000 per kilo.
Australian ice-cream lovers have been told to brace for a global shortage of vanilla beans
It will be harder for vanilla ice-cream lovers to have an original scoop of ice-cream from now on
‘Vanilla is your true flavour, so we make sure the vanilla that we use is the best we can afford and if it does cost more then we have to wear it,’ Mr Toce told the station.
The situation was a far cry from four years back when vanilla pods were ‘cheap and in oversupply’, the station reports.
It was earlier reported that Cyclone Enawo had torn through 80 per cent of the world’s vanilla crops in Africa’s East.
This left ice cream vendors worldwide with a nasty headache.
The station reports that farmers in Madagascar have started replanting new vanilla crops to overcome to shortage.
However, the shortage is expected to persist as it takes seven years for vanilla beans to grow to its full form.
A massive cyclone hit Madagascar in April which produces a third of the world’s vanilla beans