Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly, adapt to change and bounce back after facing difficulties or stress. I have watched it in the communities I source from for years. This year I had to find it in my own business.
What I see when I sit with the people who grow things
As I scour the globe sourcing ingredients, I come across indigenous communities surviving and living off land and sea. I build relationships. I sit down, I explain what I am looking for and why, and I show them what I do with it.
Most of the time I find the same thing. They do not know the true value of their own crop. Nobody has told them what an organic wild harvest is worth to the right buyer, or how to reach one. So I teach that part, because a fair price at origin is the only thing that keeps an ingredient, and the people who tend it, still there in ten years.
That is the 360° I talk about. Earth to shelf, and back again.
The year my orders started stretching
Looking honestly at my own business over the last few years, my orders have dropped. Regular customers who used to reorder on a rhythm started stretching that next order by a week. Then sometimes by a month.
That hits the business. It also adds a layer of stress that most people do not see, because I rely on those sales to fund the indigenous projects I have built around the world. Those projects exist to keep the ingredients sustainable. Slower sales do not just slow me down. They slow the source.
I could have waited for it to pick up. Waiting is not resilience. Adapting is.
The lightbulb moment was already in my hands
I was sitting with the problem when the answer turned out to be sitting on the shelf next to me.
I am already out there sourcing. I am already handling these ingredients to develop my own products. Those same ingredients carry a value beyond my formulations, because they are organic wild harvest food ingredients. Rare, exotic, traceable, and almost impossible to buy honestly at this quality.
Chefs want them. Distillers want them. I already have the relationships and the certification to move them properly.
So I opened the sourcing up. Same ingredients, same origins, same growers, now available direct to the people who cook and distil for a living.
Nine months for a flower, one day to catch it
Vanilla is the best example I have of why this matters.
I source vanilla direct from origin in the remote islands of Vanuatu. The vines rely on rich volcanic soil and a warm tropical climate. Smallholder farms and indigenous families cultivate Vanilla Planifolia using organic hands-on methods, planting near support trees and hand pollinating every flower.
Vanilla is among the most labour-intensive crops in the world, and the numbers explain why. The orchid blooms for a single day each year. Its flowers are fertile for just 8 to 12 hours. Inside that window, every single blossom has to be hand pollinated. Miss it, and that flower gives you nothing for another year.
Nine months pass between that flower and a green bean ready to harvest. The beans come off when their tips just begin to turn slightly yellow.
Then the curing starts. Scalding, sweating, slow sun drying, indoor resting, over several months. Enzymatic curing is what turns an odourless green pod into the flexible, fragrant, dark brown bean you actually recognise as vanilla. That is another three months.
Nine months on the vine. Three months in the cure. One day a year to catch the flower.
When you next look at the price of real single origin vanilla, that is what you are looking at.
What comes with every bean
Every pod I sell is organic, grade A gourmet, high grade, single origin. It also arrives with its paperwork.
- A plant health certificate (phytosanitary) on every ingredient
- Proof of origin on every ingredient
- Funding for indigenous projects at origin, from every ingredient sold
After every harvest, we replant five times more than we took. That is not a gesture. It is the only way the ingredient still exists to sell next decade.
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly, adapt to change and bounce back after facing difficulties or stress.
The orchid gives you one day. The grower shows up for it. That is the standard I try to hold myself to when the orders slow down.
If you cook or distil for a living
If you are a chef wanting to be inspired by organic wild harvest ingredients, rare and exotic and sourced from origin, I can source them direct for you. And you change lives at origin at the same time.
If you run a distillery and you are hunting infusions nobody else is pouring, this is where they come from.
Email me at rebecca@rebeccaday360.com and tell me what you are trying to make. I will tell you what I can get, where it grows, and who harvests it.
Come and see it for yourself
I am putting together a South Pacific expedition so a small group can stand in the vanilla and see the source of these ingredients first hand. Meet the families. Watch a flower get pollinated in its 12 hour window. Understand exactly why looking after the indigenous communities on these remote islands is the whole point.
Dates and details are not confirmed yet. If you want to be told first, email me and I will put you on the list.
Every sale keeps on giving. That is not a slogan on a label, it is the reason the vanilla is still growing.