If you take 2 minutes to read the following paragraphs, you will understand what I represent, how I operate, and how that applies to you, your money, and your recipes. And for those of you specifically from the culinary world, this may affect your career and reputation.
At Top Shelf Vanilla™ you can now buy 100% single-extraction, whole vanilla bean, all-natural, small batch vanilla extracts that are hand-made one gallon at a time, and are vintage-dated from the day they were created. What sets us apart is that our extracts and flavoring components are derived exclusively from whole vanilla beans and “top shelf” alcohol solvents. I don’t spike any of my products with artificial ingredients or flavors. I make our extracts exclusively this way, so you can be confident that the product you buy from me is made entirely from the organic, living plant matter found in the Madagascar vanilla beans.
Note, here in the states, the FDA doesn’t have guidelines for how long vanilla beans must be extracted in solvent to be labeled as “Pure Vanilla Extract.” Thirty minutes? Six weeks? Twelve weeks? Anything goes. And just how many extractions do those same beans go through? Again, there are no rules to protect consumers from bean recycling and advertising trickery. With an average price of $500 a gallon, that’s not something I will be a part of.
Another problem with the FDA is that they allow ingredients that are neither inherent nor organically intrinsic to a vanilla bean to enter a product labeled “Pure Vanilla Extract.” Call me crazy, but don’t you think that a label printed with “Pure Vanilla Extract” should be vanilla extract derived purely from the actual plant matter of real vanilla beans?
For example, the FDA allows for sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, coloring, dyes, glycerin, propylene glycol, and vanillin derived from petrochemicals and wood pulp to be labeled as “Pure Vanilla Extract.” In the European Union, only the vanilla extracted 100% from vanilla beans can be labeled as “natural,” and we’d like to see that adopted naming convention here stateside. But using the word “natural” here in the States has no moral code useful or applicable to vanilla.
An interesting fact is that the vanillin measured in vanilla beans represents about ≈2% by weight of the flavor compound material content, and out of 300 flavor compounds comprised in a vanilla bean, 2% of vanillin is its largest stakeholder, but it’s still only 2% of the material within a real vanilla bean. The other 299 flavor compounds make up the remaining 98%. Other than vanilla, where else can you have only 2% of anything and call it pure? So why vanilla?
Also complicating and confusing the vanilla consumer, the FDA has no guidelines to prohibit vanilla extractors from using heat or high pressurization (euphemistically called “cold-pressed”) to hastily short-cut the extraction process. Though all culinary chefs and chemists know that molecular acceleration from heat and high pressurization causes compressed friction from volatilization and will destroy most of the flavor compounds inherent to the benevolent vanilla bean, this savage process is prevalent throughout the industry.
For example, search on YouTube for how to “InstaPot” your vanilla beans to extract in just 30 minutes. If you put your delicious vanilla beans in 40% ethanol alcohol and boil them at 240 degrees for thirty minutes, what do you expect it to taste like? This heating method and other pressurized extraction processes are used throughout the industry. They are the “vanilla bean extractives” you read listed in the ingredients of most extracts resold to retail consumers and commercial food producers.
What further sets Top Shelf Vanilla™ apart is that I extract using the classic methodology; my extracts are 100% passive extractions in a 75-degree climate-controlled environment. Therefore, every flavor compound in each whole bean picked and cured in Madagascar has 100% of its flavor integrity inside the bottle you buy from me. Thus, there is no way to make a more flavorful and authentic extract than what I make and subsequently offer to you. And this allows me to use Grade A vanilla beans.
Note that I use only Grade A vanilla beans because they still have their vanilla butter intact. That’s why the extract is cloudy; it’s also why it’s so flavorful and why it mixes so well with dairy butter and the oils used in baking, as well as the cocoa butter inherent to chocolate. Note that Grade A beans are not used in large commercial, mass-production vanilla extract manufacturing because the vanilla butter clogs up the filtering machines required for mass production.
In summary, my aim is to do this for you as if you were making it for yourself, but without you paying the upfront costs of inventory or waiting for the long periods associated with doing it yourself. Let’s face the reality of vanilla together: this stuff is expensive, and there are fakes, impostors, labeling mysteries, and scams everywhere. Sourcing extracts from me solves the vulnerability inherent in this industry, so you know what you are buying. So, before you go and drop a couple of hundred or a few thousand dollars, if you want to know what’s in the bottle and what you are paying for, you are assured to get that warranty from me, just like if you had made it yourself a year or two ago. And at an average price of $500 a gallon, don’t you think you wisely and sensibly deserve that?
Though I found the hide-and-go-seek issues noted above with the FDA unprofessional and reckless, I also found it an unrealized market opportunity. So, I put my money where my mouth is to solve my vanilla problems, and I hope I’m solving your vanilla problems, too. With both professional and personal sincerity, I look forward to partnering with you to provide you with the highest quality and most delicious vanilla products conceivable.
About the Founder: Mark Nichols
The Genesis for the Making of Top Shelf Vanilla™
Four years ago, a close friend gifted me a bread-making machine, and in my attempt to make a cinnamon-raisin recipe, I discovered my pantry was empty of vanilla extract. Thus, I went to my Amazon account to order some and was surprised at the price for such a product. After the initial sticker shock of ≈$500 a gallon, it was unclear to me what I was going to get if I bought it. In a nutshell, it was the roguishness of it all that concerned me so much that I’d simply rather make my own. So, I did.
From this humble start, I began experimenting with different alcohols and very long extraction time periods at a constant 75-degree room temperature. After a few years of product research and testing, the resulting flavor experiences provided the differentiation and encouragement to present it to culinary artists.
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