Beyond Good: The Madagascar Terroir Behind Premium Chocolate and Vanilla

Sorting vanilla

photo by author

Peanut butter and jelly.

Tomato and basil.

Chocolate and vanilla.

There is no flavor pairing more universally connected than chocolate and vanilla—forevermore the most popular of dessert flavors, or hot fudge dripping down a perfect scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Whether using them in the form of cocoa powder or chocolate chips, or vanilla paste, extract, or freshly-scraped beans, they are admired as the most necessary of ingredients to heighten the depth of flavor in brownies, cookies, chocolate cake, or just biting into a solid chocolate bar.

Proof that these two global staples of comfort were not uncovered by accident one day in a kitchen lies in the forests of Madagascar, where the soil that makes up the unimaginably biodiverse island purposely allows them to grow symbiotically.

Perhaps it is destined that human beings are so drawn to these delicacies. Vanilla has the same gestation period as humans; nine months from pollination to harvest. Chocolate has nearly the same melting point as the human body; why it begins melting the moment it touches the tongue.

The two are inherently linked. Vanilla—the world’s only edible orchid—grows on vines intermingled among the cocoa trees that create a forested ecosystem, providing shade for the delicate green vanilla pods, working together for each to thrive.

Beyond Good, which sources Madagascar cocoa and vanilla for its premium chocolate and vanilla products through the vertically integrated supply chain it has created, has built the market’s highest standards for these products. Those standards are reflected in the quality of the final products, a quality that makes its consumers realize they may have never experienced what true chocolate and vanilla taste like.

What grows together, goes together.

Manual Pollination

Growing vanilla in Madagascar makes no practical sense. Nevertheless, the global population has created such strong demand for it, making the country the world’s largest vanilla exporter.

“Vanilla is one of the most complex flavors in the world and people are paying for the quality coming from Madagascar,” Chuy Del Toro, Beyond Good Global Sourcing and Sustainability Manager, tells me. “It’s richer, creamier, more of a caramel and slightly spicy undertone.”

Similar to Beyond Good founder Tim McCollum, Del Toro became familiar with Madagascar while on a two-year Peace Corps assignment in the country. “I knew very little about Madagascar. I just wanted to be in the agriculture sector in Africa,” says Del Toro, who later moved back to Madagascar to work with Beyond Good. “My first year in Ambanja was really getting to know the supply chain deeply.”

Del Toro completed his master’s thesis on the vanilla supply chain and implementing agroforestry programs, which directly relates to his work with Beyond Good buying vanilla and cocoa from its farmer partners. “Farmers were just growing vanilla, but over time the systems became more diversified with strong partners,” he says. “A big part of my job is having a presence and talking with farmers.”

While the vast majority is grown and produced in Madagascar, the vanilla plant is not endemic to the island nation—originally brought over from Mexico. It is a phenomenon that Madagascar now produces more than three tons of vanilla every year because every single vanilla pod is pollinated manually; the necessary pollinators do not exist on the island.

During the French Bourbon Dynasty rule in the mid-1800s, there was a slave named Edmond Albius on nearby Réunion Island, who came across manual pollination when he was 12 years old, creating Bourbon Vanilla in Madagascar a possibility. That simple technique changed the entire economic trajectory of the nation.

“Every day hundreds of thousands of flowers are pollinated,” Del Toro says. “This is a person’s livelihood… if they miss an orchid, that’s money they’re not making.”

There is vanilla grown in a handful of small cities across Madagascar, but it is largely kept to the Northeastern ‘SAVA’ region, which consists of the cities Sambava, Andapa, Vohemar, and Antalaha, to ease distribution, which is often the most difficult process in the supply chain given the extremely poor infrastructure across the country. It can take up to 30 hours of an intensely bumpy drive from the closest airport.

Vanilla takes seven to 12 years before it can yield a harvest. Similar to champagne, the government puts out a decree when farmers are able to begin the harvest. Farmers sleep close to their farms when that moment is looming to begin as immediately as they possibly can. Some vanilla pods are tattooed with knife carvings for identification purposes to mitigate theft. This is their livelihood.

“There is a lot of pride,” Del Toro says, “in these farmers knowing that their vanilla is the most sought-after in the world.”

The Only Edible Orchid

Growing on vines in the wild, the Vanilla Planifolia plant, the only edible orchid in the world, looks more like a pod of green beans than the dark and wrinkled vanilla we are accustomed to.

Beyond Good has specific specifications that its vanilla farmer partners must meet in terms of traceability and direct trade with farmers. While it does not own its own vanilla factory like it does with chocolate, it sets the standards that its processors must meet.

“We were vastly exceeding the Fair for Life certification standards,” Del Toro says. “We created a third-party certification that actually took our business model into consideration: Beyond Good Direct Trade Certified. We’re highlighting the relationship with our farmers. It’s important that all consumers understand what they’re looking at.”

Once harvested, this ‘green’ vanilla gets sent immediately to the processing facility where it’s weighed and sorted by size. Larger pods upwards of 18 centimeters are sorted for Beyond Good’s full-size vanilla beans, while shorter pods and those with some imperfections, referred to as ‘red’ vanilla, get sorted for vanilla extract and powder.

The beans then begin to develop their flavor when they are washed and blanched in tubs of boiling water about 150 degrees Fahrenheit. The vanilla’s growth gets stunted and is sterilized in the bath that lasts only a few minutes. The blanched beans are then fermented for two to three days, then begin the tedious but necessary drying process, where the beans start to gain their classic shriveled texture. The process is long and technical.

“The beans are wrapped in blankets and stored in wooden boxes for 14 days,” Del Toro explains. “It enables fermentation, produces that signature aroma, and you start to see the color change.”

The beans are now their signature dark brown color, laying evenly on tarps to be dried under the sharp Madagascar sunrays for an hour and a half each day for the first few days. Then they lay out for an extra hour each day for the next month. This slow process allows the vanilla to remain full of moisture despite shriveling up.

Each day when the beans take their breaks from the sun, workers at the vanilla factory massage each pod, one by one, over and over again–carefully, patiently, gently, as if time doesn’t exist–releasing oils and aromas. It really depicts the long processing time it takes to produce this gourmet vanilla. The sun can curl up the edges, and human touch straightens them out again.

Once the beans complete the drying process, they are aged, like wine, in wooden boxes to complete its flavor development before they are once again sorted and graded. This is primarily seen in Madagascar as a female profession. Many of them have been doing this for decades–examining bundles of moist vanilla at robotic speeds. They sit silently at long tables, tediously using their senses to count and sort for gourmet, extract, powder or caviar, taking rulers to measure the length of the pods, and tying them in bundles of twine to be vacuum sealed and sent to Beyond Good’s distribution center.

“When I see a Madagascar vanilla product anywhere, faces come about,” Del Toro says. “I immediately start thinking about the individuals.”

The Sambirano Valley

Unlike most crops which have a single harvest–two if you’re lucky–cocoa in Madagascar is harvested year-round. “Cocoa is always in season,” Del Toro says.

The majority of farms that Beyond Good sources its cocoa from are nestled in Madagascar’s Sambirano Valley, a famed cocoa region with a cooler climate. Cocoa trees in this region originated in Sri Lanka and were later planted here, helping reforest the land in a heavily deforested country. The sediment-heavy alluvial soil from the riverbanks gets washed up throughout the entire region during its rainy season which contributes to the unique flavor profiles that arise in the finished chocolate.

These trees also produce a rare type of cocoa called Criollo.

“Cocoa originated in the Amazon, then the Mayans hybridized it and got it to what they felt was the perfect flavor, which is Criollo,” McCollum explains. “That then made its way eventually to Madagascar where it stayed without much hybridization or commercialization.”

Most chocolate that we consume derives from Forastero cocoa, which is highly commoditized–sold to global distributors for other factories around the world to make chocolate out of. “It’s all made with Forastero, so it all tastes the same,” McCollum explains. “It’s a myth that some of that specialty chocolate is premium, but it’s the same that goes into KitKats.”

Beyond Good is not commodity chocolate nor is it posing as premium. Its unique taste largely stems from the mix of Forastero and Criollo.

“Most people have no idea that chocolate can have different flavors just from the cocoa. It doesn’t have to be this ubiquitous chocolate flavor,” McCollum says. “What dictates flavor more is origin, something that most chocolate bars do not disclose.”

Criollo has streaks of white veins running through the inside of the beans, whereas Forastero is purple. Criollo has unmistakably deeper flavor profiles, often that of red fruits.

Madagascar cocoa pods are much more narrow, concentrating the flavor, whereas West Africa cocoa, largely used for commodity purposes, has been hybridized to be much larger for higher yield. Beyond Good even works with some farms that have produced extremely rare 100% Criollo cocoa.

“Criollo is less than one percent of one percent of the world’s cacao,” McCollum expresses. “It only exists here because it requires 60% shade and we have a three-tiered canopy. It can’t fruit with sun exposure, where Forastero can.”

McCollum often guides chocolate-tasting sessions. “You taste chocolate with your back teeth,” he explains. “Let it melt a little, smell the aroma, let it linger in so you know what the finish is. If it’s really good cocoa, the chocolate releases interesting flavors–cherry, cranberry, raspberry.”

From Bean To Bar

Farmers enter the labyrinth of the forested cacao farm and search for ripe pods with deep ridges; some are easy to harvest from the base of the tree, others are high up in the canopy. Farmers climb barefoot with a long pole to assist, it has a sharp edge and they use it to cut the pod down. It falls to the ground, but the strong pod doesn’t dent against the soft leaf-ridden floor.

Thousands of pods are carried out in zebu-drawn wheelbarrows, the species of cattle that outnumber people in Madagascar, famously with a large hump on its back. There is no modern machinery used here–just manual and animal labor. “You can get deeper in the forest with zebus,” Del Toro says. “It makes work easier.”

It continues when farmers use machetes to swiftly break open the pods to retrieve the pulpy core. The process is slimy, but organized like an efficient assembly line. Others are tasked with removing the beans from the placenta of the cocoa pod so that only the fleshy wet beans remain. The waste of the cocoa pod is often repurposed into animal feed or mulch.

“The Beyond Good model is to buy everything the farmers have. We would rather buy a lot from small farmers than buy a little from a lot of big farms,” Del Toro says. “The most important thing in Madagascar is for farmers to sell their crops, but we get them a better price and involve them more in the process.”

Cocoa beans are then fermented for six days–a short period relative to vanilla–where the wet beans are placed into large wooden crates, fermenting from its own heat that continually builds up, acids breaking down the pulp. The six day hibernation ends, and they are sun-dried under the intense Madagascar sun for about an hour every day for five days, regularly raked so that each side can absorb the spirit of Madagascar and develop a deeper flavor.

“We make sure people are really on the dot and respecting these times,” Del Toro says. “You really need to adhere to the schedule to get good quality down the line.”

But before these “dry” beans are sent to the factory to be made into chocolate, Beyond Good assesses the quality to make sure it meets its standards.

This is where you can see how different Beyond Good’s cocoa beans are, using a ‘guillotine’ that splits open a sample of beans, something commodity cocoa never experiences. Farmers then examine the batch by looking for those white streaks of rare Criollo.

“Normally someone calls, they want cocoa, they ship it, it arrives six months later. They might do quality once they receive the cocoa,” McCollum says, “but it’s too late at that point to know if it’s any good.”

The beans are placed in a hydrometer, looking almost like an electric kettle, to test the moisture. Beyond Good requires less than 8% moisture, whereas most commodity cocoa beans are above 20%.

When the totes of dry cocoa beans arrive at the Beyond Good chocolate factory in Madagascar’s capital city on Antananarivo, they are hand-sifted or any debris or imperfections by a group of women who keep an attentive eye on each and every bean that makes its way into the factory.

Now the chocolate making process initiates, first by roasting the cocoa beans to develop flavor even further. The room begins to smell like a campfire. Once the beans are cooled, they are mixed with cocoa butter and ground into a liquid mixture.

“We use deodorized cocoa butter to not impact the flavor,” McCollum says. “The cocoa butter acts just for mouthfeel and texture, not flavor.”

Cocoa nibs are ground into a thick paste and transported into conches, where mixed with the chocolate mixture and sugar, refined for a smoother mouthfeel. It continues churning for up to 48 hours, removing the bitter and acidic taste, creating a rounded chocolate flavor. The chocolate is then poured into molds, solidified, packaged and sent to thousands of retail stores in the United States.

A chocolate maker is a winemaker–a scientist–and a cocoa farm is a vineyard. There is no relative difference. You experience the hands that harvest grapes in each sip, and the Madagascar terroir is deeply entrenched in each teaspoon of its vanilla extract and bite of its chocolate bars.

“When I open the wrapper,” McCollum says, “I think about the people who closed it.”

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