About ¾ of the world’s vanilla production takes place on Madagascar, Comoros and Réunion, three islands located off Africa‘s south-eastern coast. Major producers can also be found in Indonesia, Tahiti, Tonga – and of course Mexico.

Reunion has a special place in the history of commercial vanilla cultivation because this island was the home of Edmond Albius, the man who invented a modern technique of hand-pollination that is still in use today. This new method made vanilla cultivation much more efficient than before since the old methods used for hand-pollination were highly time consuming. In the wild, the vanilla orchid is pollinated by the Melipone bee but this bee only exists in Mexico.

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