Cyclones, Drought and a Record El Niño Are Squeezing Vanilla, Cocoa and Citrus Supplies, Food Industry Says

About 80% of the world's natural vanilla comes from one place: Madagascar. That single fact, according to Yuvraj Arora, president of the Taste division and Chief Commercial Officer at IFF, explains why a spice most people think of as basic is actually one of the most fragile links in the global food chain.

Arora made the case at Newsweek's Future of Food and Agriculture Forum in New York, where he described vanilla as "one of the most important flavor tonalities" in the industry. Madagascar's exposure to cyclones and drought means a single bad storm season can ripple through grocery store shelves worldwide. IFF has been investing in the country's vanilla supply chain since 2010, working directly with farmers on agricultural science to help them manage that volatility, Arora said.

Arora's broader point: climate volatility is hitting more than vanilla. He pointed to excessive heat and drought in West Africa, home to most of the world's cocoa supply, and hurricanes in Florida disrupting citrus. He also noted that climate stress can fuel armed conflict, compounding ingredient shortages further. Both Newsweek and Yahoo News carried this account of Arora's remarks, and a Newsweek Middle East republication via Press Bee simply reproduced the same reporting without adding new detail.

Chefs Are Already Rewriting Menus

The disruption isn't theoretical for working chefs. At the Apapaxoa gastronomic festival in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, held as United Nations experts flagged what Agence France-Presse described as an exceptionally strong El Niño cycle, chefs described real-time menu chaos.

Brazilian chef Alex Atala told AFP he now adjusts his São Paulo restaurant's annual menu almost weekly because ingredients simply aren't available. Ants sourced from the Amazon, once a signature ingredient tied to Indigenous culinary traditions, are now offered only to customers who specifically request them. Atala also said flooded roads and wildfires delay shipments so badly that fresh product arrives spoiled, calling the disappearance of traditional ingredients a "cultural loss."

In Spain, chef Quique Dacosta, whose restaurant sits near Valencia, pointed to the region's 2024 floods, which AFP reported killed almost 250 people and destroyed vineyards, orange groves and the rice paddies that supply Albufera rice, an ingredient central to paella. Dacosta told AFP the storms don't just wreck crops, they also scare off customers: "It's going to rain a lot, and people just don't come anymore," he said, describing how vulnerable restaurant businesses are to a bad storm season.

Betting on Fermentation and Lab Science Instead of Waiting on Weather

Rather than simply absorbing losses, parts of the food industry are trying to engineer their way around volatile crops entirely. IFF's Lakeland, Florida citrus center developed what Arora called IFF NEO, a non-essential-oil technology that recreates lime, lemon, grapefruit, tangerine and orange flavors without using any actual citrus oil, insulating that flavor line from hurricane damage to Florida groves.

A similar approach is underway with cocoa. French malt producer Soufflet Malt and food tech firm Eat the Truth, according to Green Queen, have partnered to use grain fermentation to produce cocoa-like and roasted flavor notes without cocoa itself. The timing tracks with cocoa prices that Green Queen reported hit all-time records in 2025 amid climate-linked shortages out of West Africa.

"This partnership combines our expertise in fermentation with Eat the Truth's approach to flavor creation using food ingredients," said Laurent Debande, chief growth and innovation officer at Soufflet Malt. Eat the Truth co-founder and CEO Yair Yosefi said the goal is flavor solutions "designed from the outset for industrial-scale production." The company's SHO-branded ingredients are already used by more than 300 chefs across seven countries, per Green Queen.

A Fair Question: Is This Climate Change or Just El Niño?

El Niño is a naturally occurring, cyclical ocean-atmosphere pattern that has disrupted weather and crops for centuries, independent of any long-term warming trend. AFP's own reporting frames the current disruption as tied to "an exceptionally strong El Niño cycle," as flagged by UN experts, not solely to anthropogenic climate change.

Climate scientists and advocates argue the two are linked, that a warming planet is intensifying El Niño's swings and shrinking the margin for error in agriculture, and that argument deserves a fair hearing. But commodity volatility in cocoa and vanilla has plenty of non-weather drivers too, including currency swings, smuggling and political instability in Ivory Coast and Ghana, and crop disease in Madagascar's vanilla regions. None of the sources here quantify how much of the current disruption is attributable to long-term warming versus this year's El Niño cycle specifically.

What's not in dispute is the business response. Companies aren't waiting for a policy fix. IFF, Soufflet Malt and Eat the Truth are spending R&D money now to make their supply chains weather-proof, a market-driven bet that innovation, not mandates, is the fastest way to keep vanilla, citrus and chocolate on shelves the next time a cyclone hits Madagascar or floods hit Valencia again.