At Nielsen-Massey vanillas Incorporated in Waukegan, the plant walls have been designed to automatically pop out if ever there is an explosion. It seems strange that creating such a sweet-smelling, soothing flavoring should involve some risk.
But the process of extracting the essence from the vanilla bean requires combining it with highly volatile grain alcohol, a substance that streams through pipes in the Nielsen-Massey plant from two 5,000-gallon stainless steel tanks into 26 extractors, each holding up to 600 gallons.
If by some remote possibility there should be an explosion, huge panels in the steel walls would spring open to vent the pressure in the building and theoretically reduce damage.
But when properly controlled, the making of vanilla, a flavoring discovered by the Aztecs and now used throughout the world, is deceptively simple.
In the 86 years since founder Richard Massey opened his first facility in Sterling, Ill., there has been no serious mishap in the family owned company. Nielsen-Massey is the largest company devoted purely to making vanilla extract and is second only to McCormick Spices in volume and sales of vanilla.
The plant in Waukegan’s Amherst Industrial Park went on line in June when it outgrew quarters in Lake Forest. Before moving to Lake Forest in 1985 the plant had operated for 68 years at 1215 W. Webster St., Chicago.
Those entering the new facility often detect the pervasive, heady perfume of vanilla, but employees say they no longer notice it, said Camilla Nielsen, executive vice president of the corporation.
Her husband Chat Nielsen, who had been president since 1970, died in December, and she has been running the business with son Craig, vice president of sales, and nephew David Klemann, the vice president of finance and production.
Huge extracting tanks
The manufacturing section of the plant, which occupies about 85 percent of the 33,500-square-foot building, seems astonishingly spare, consisting mainly of the gleaming pairs of stainless steel extracting tanks mounted on a concrete floor that is epoxied smooth enough to see your reflection and clean enough to eat from.
But this is definitely a factory: There are no hints of the ice cream cones or milkshakes the vanilla will become. There is no indication that the beans that are shredded and processed into the bottles of brown aromatic extract began as delicate yellow orchid blossoms in tropical jungles.
The vanilla beans-the raw material for making the extract-come from four main growing areas (see accompanying story) and each has different flavor characteristics, ranging from smoky to sweet to a tobacco-like aroma as fragrant as a good cigar. Distinguishing the quality of a bean takes time and experience, a little like wine tasting.
Each box of beans that arrives at the plant is examined by hand, by sight and by smell, Chat Nielsen explained during a tour of the facility before his death. Nielsen, who spent his life working for the family-owned company, could sniff a bean or a few drops of extract and immediately identify the source. Like a tea taster, he also could tell how the bean was cured, whether it was mature when picked and perhaps a few other characteristics.
“It’s not that I have such a great sense of smell,” Nielsen said. “It’s just that I’ve spent my life doing it. It’s my business. If I don’t like the quality of a shipment, even if I’ve been buying from the guy for a long time, I’ll send them back.
“Sometimes they (vanilla bean brokers) think they can sneak in a few pounds of lesser-grade. We just turn it around. If we can’t get enough high-quality beans, we just don’t make as much vanilla, and that has happened. But our production is consistent and people know they can count on it.”
The most expensive beans-though not necessarily the best-come from the Madagascar and nearby Reunion island in the South Indian Ocean and are called Bourbon, a holdover from when Reunion was a French possession called Ile de Bourbon. Nielsen said he preferred Mexican beans-probably the original source of vanilla-but they are hard to get, because the Mexicans use so much vanilla themselves.
In terms of availability, Mexico exports fewer than six metric tons of vanilla beans each year, while Madagascar and Reunion island export 900 to 1,000 metric tons, or 60 to 70 percent of the world’s total yearly vanilla bean production.
Nielsen-Massey uses Indonesian and Tahitian beans for some applications.
“We want to start with the best,” said Nielsen. “We do buy some Java cuts (beans that have had bad spots cut out of them), which we use for some lower-cost mixtures. Cuts run about a third the cost of Bourbon beans.”
The eight-inch brown beans-dried and cured-are machine-chopped into two-inch shreds. This mulch is shoveled into the stainless circulation extractors, tanks that subject them to a constant bath of alcohol and water at room temperature-mixed according to a computer program-that washes over them in a constant cycle. The rinsing process lasts from 10 days to as long as four weeks, depending on the strength of extract desired and the amount of bean pulp used.
Extracting the vanilla flavor is a delicate operation, said Nielsen. “You have to be careful, if you use a little too much alcohol in the washing solution, you will freeze the flavor components. If you use too little alcohol, you won’t get extraction.”
Heat destroys the flavor, so the Nielsen-Massey plant practices a cold extraction in which the temperature of the solution as well as the whole plant is computer-controlled to remain a constant 72 degrees year-round.
To make a two-fold concentration of extract (using about 2 pounds of beans per gallon of alcohol) by the cold extraction method takes three weeks of washing. If heat were used, as it is by some other companies that make vanilla, the process would take only three days, but a lot of flavor and subtlety would be lost, Nielsen said.
When the process is complete the extraction is a deep brown, highly aromatic liquid that gets piped into large tanks for storing until it can be bottled in a device that not only measures in a set amount of extract, but checks it by weight and makes subsequent micro-adjustments to make the measure exact.
“Some customers (such as ice cream manufacturers) measure the amounts of flavoring very accurately, especially when we’re talking about a four-fold extract,” which can cost almost $140 a gallon, Nielsen said. “What we sell them has to be precise.”
About 95 percent of Nielsen’s extract is sold to commercial firms such as Haagen-Dazs, Dove International, Dreyers Ice Cream, Eli’s Cheesecake, Honey Hill Farms, Lean Cuisine Ice Cream and E. J. Brach Co. Candy Co. Much of that is sold in gallon containers of two-fold and three-fold concentrations. For the retail market, amounting to 4 or 5 percent of Nielsen’s business, the extract is packed in small vials, eight-ounce bottles and other containers suitable for home use, all of which are filled at the plant and sold under the Nielsen-Massey brand name.
While explaining the difference between natural and synthetic vanilla flavorings, Chat Nielsen said the underlying philosophy of the Nielsen-Massey company has always been “to stick with the one product and do it the best we can. Some times have been better than others, but business has improved recently with more people looking for all-natural foods. We are more expensive than some, but nobody complains about our quality, that’s our pride.”
