Cloves (Mada). A farmer at one of our Madagascan clove trees — the same trees that produce the whole flower buds we ship as Madagascar Cloves. Clove trees can live over 100 years, and every bud is picked by hand.
Meet the farmers
The people behind every pod.
Who actually does the work?
Vanilla is the second most labour-intensive crop on earth — every flower hand-pollinated, every pod hand-harvested, every bean slow-cured by hand over months. None of that happens without people.
These are some of the families and partners we work with on the ground — captured between tasks, mid-cure, or at the end of a long day.
Sun-drying the cured beans. After the étuvage stage, the pods are laid out on woven mats for about three weeks — three to five hours under direct sun each day, gradually lengthened until the bean is ready.
A portrait of one of our partners on the ground — the people who keep the day-to-day operations running between Josie's visits.
Some of the men who do the daily work — pollination, harvest, the long slow cure. Nine months from flower to finished pod, and almost all of it happens outside.
The wider farming community. Vanilla is hand-pollinated, hand-harvested and cured by entire families — the work doesn't happen any other way.