Beaver Butts Emit Goo Used For Vanilla Flavoring

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“It turns out that the stuff is incredibly expensive, because it’s rare; there's no way it’s in your ice cream,” says Michelle Francl, a chemist at Bryn Mawr College who studies the science of food. 

Where does vanilla flavoring come from? 

According to Francl, in 2020 about 16 million pounds of vanilla extract —collected from vanilla orchids, a large group of flowering plants—was produced worldwide, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

That said, castoreum still exists in niche products such as bäversnaps, a Swedish liquor, according to the 2022 book Beavers: Ecology, Behaviour, Conservation, and Management by Frank Rosell and Róisín Campbell-Palmer. In total, the U.S. consumes less than 292 pounds a year of castoreum, castoreum extract, and castoreum liquid, according to the latest edition of Fenaroli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients.

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To harvest castoreum, trappers kill beavers and remove their castor glands, which are dried and crushed. They then use alcohol to extract castoreum, similar to how vanilla is removed from the plant to make your vanilla ice cream, Francl says.

Read more about the history of vanilla.

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