Have you ever looked at the back of a vanilla ice cream carton, read "natural and artificial vanilla," and wondered exactly what you're eating?
Chances are it's synthetic vanillin, which tastes like real vanilla extract. Today, over 95% of vanilla flavoring used in foods, from cereal to ice cream, comes from vanillin.
The Museum of Food and Drink recently opened in Brooklyn, and its first exhibition looks at the complex history of synthetic vanilla. It started in 1858, when French chemist discovered how to isolate real vanillin, the main component of the vanilla bean.
Vanillin can come from vanilla beans, but the process takes a lot of labor and land to produce, so chemists have gotten crafty in the materials they've used to make synthetic vanillin in a lab.
One of these many sources is ... coal tar.
German chemists Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarmann later found they could replicate vanilla by using chemical compounds from coal in 1874. This was a huge innovation for the flavor industry (which would grow to the $25 billion industry that it is today), because it meant scientists could make synthetic vanilla by using something other than the vanilla bean.
By the 1930s, artificial vanilla (some derived from coal) became mainstream in US households.
In the US, coal tar is not as widely used as it once was to make artificial vanilla due to health concerns. Some studies show that consuming flavors derived from large amounts of coal can be carcinogenic. It's still used in many vanilla-flavored foods in Mexico, where there are fewer food and labeling regulations.
Real vanilla is the only flavor regulated by US law, which mandates that a gallon of real vanilla extract must have 13.35 ounces of vanilla beans in a solution of 35% alcohol. Vanillin, on the other hand, is not as strictly regulated as long as brands label their foods with "artificial" or "imitation" vanilla.
Coal tar isn't the only thing that's been used to produce synthetic vanillin. Over the last century, cinnamon, paper waste, pine bark, and even cow poop has mimicked the taste and smell of real vanilla.
Because it’s so cheap, annual global demand for imitation vanilla is nearly 37 times that for natural vanilla extract.
