Vanilla is what a milkshake tastes like before anyone adds anything, and National Vanilla Milkshake Day is happy to leave it there. Make one with good ice cream and cold milk, and drink it before it thins out.
No founder or establishing record for National Vanilla Milkshake Day was located in the Federal Register or in HathiTrust's full-text index. What the day visibly produces is commercial: national restaurant chains run June 20 milkshake offers that the restaurant trade press covers.
National Vanilla Milkshake Day celebrates a flavour the world almost never gets from an actual vanilla bean. As of 2020, the US International Trade Commission reports, the industry estimates that one percent or less of global market demand is met by vanillin derived from natural vanilla beans. Nearly all the rest is manufactured.
The molecule doing the work is vanillin, and it is cheap to make. In 2019 one report put the share of global vanilla flavour and fragrance demand met by petroleum-derived vanillin at more than 85 percent, with some estimates closer to 95 percent. Most of the remaining vanillin on the market comes from lignin, a waste stream of paper mills.
The price tells the same story from the other end. Synthetic vanillin can sell for as little as ten dollars a kilo, while vanillin taken from the bean runs from hundreds to thousands, depending on the harvest that year. The day is a decent excuse to notice which one is in the glass.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Vanilla Milkshake Day ran on June 20. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
For roughly three centuries the vanilla grown in Europe gave up almost no pods. In 1836 the Belgian horticulturist Charles Morren attributed the missing pods to a missing insect, a pollinator he supposed was a bee of the Melipona genus.
The story everyone tells starts on Reunion, and the archives complicate it.
An enslaved gardener named Edmond, born in 1829, worked for the Bellier-Beaumont family at Sainte-Suzanne and found a practical way to fertilise the flowers by hand. Volsy Focard's article of October 1862 is the first printed account linking his name to it, and it placed the discovery in 1841.
That date came out of somebody's memory. Writing in February 1861, Fereol Bellier-Beaumont conceded that "I cannot tell you very precisely the year of the discovery," and that his recollection and Edmond's "point us to 1841." A 2024 review in the journal Plants concludes that historians simplified that into a fact.
His own circle never claimed he invented pollination. Mezieres Lepervanche told the governor in 1853 that the technique "had already been practiced ten years previously" in Brussels and Paris, but that "the process used was much less simple." What the island did with it is not in doubt: exports climbed from nothing in 1841 to more than three tons by 1858.
In 1858 the biochemist Theodore Gobley isolated vanillin and worked out its structure. A factory in Germany was making it synthetically by 1875.
Clove oil was the raw material of choice through the 1920s. The United States turned to lignin, the waste of paper mills, in the mid-1930s, and by 1981 one Ontario pulp and paper company was supplying 60 percent of the world market.
California was selling milk shakes by name long before the day existed. The Modesto Bee ran standing advertisements for Granger's Milk Shake through 1888, and the California Digital Newspaper Collection's earliest match for the phrase in that decade falls in 1886.
The vanilla version took longer to need naming. Across 1880 to 1980 that collection returns 9,720 matches for "milk shake" and 49 for "vanilla milk shake." The day itself has no founder and no establishing record in the indexes searched.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Vanilla, vanilla flavored, artificial vanilla: one rule, three different products.
Federal ice cream rules give a flavour three different names depending on what is in it, and they use vanilla as the worked example at every rung: plain vanilla for no artificial flavour, vanilla flavored where a natural and an artificial flavour are both present and the natural predominates, and artificial vanilla where the artificial one predominates or stands alone. Any shake built on a tub of ice cream started from a label that had to pick one of the three.
More than 90 percent of the world's vanilla is grown in countries outside the natural range of the crop and its wild relatives, where the plants do not fruit on their own for want of natural pollinators. Because hand pollination also lifts yields, the review that reports this says the technique has been applied in every commercial vanilla plantation worldwide.
Wayback Burgers has run an annual Free Shake Day on the date, handing out a free 12 oz vanilla milkshake at more than 170 locations nationwide, no purchase necessary. MilkShake Factory has marked the same date with buy-one-get-one vanilla milkshakes from open to close.
BY THE NUMBERS
GOOD TO KNOW
The US International Trade Commission describes vanillin as one of approximately 250 compounds that make up vanilla. The same paper notes that vanilla extract is a mixture of different compounds, not just vanillin.
Kew records that the distinctive aroma and flavour appear only when the fruit is dried and cured by steaming and fermentation. The pod comes off the vine without them.
The IUCN Red List carries Vanilla planifolia as Endangered, with a decreasing population and an area of occupancy of around 80 square kilometres. Habitat loss and the removal of wild plants for research and replanting are among the threats it names.
Kew reports that its vanilla plants flower irregularly, and that when they do the flowers are only open for eight hours. Its horticulturists pollinate them with a slim toothpick.
Merriam-Webster gives vanilla as an adjective meaning lacking distinction: plain, ordinary, conventional. That is the second sense, right after flavoured with vanilla.
MYTH VS FACT
The vanilla orchid is pollinated by the Melipona bee.
A 2024 review in Plants finds that stingless bees are often cited as the pollinators of Vanilla planifolia but that there is actually no evidence for it. The attribution traces to Arthur Delteil, who in 1884 described the insects as pale green, chestnut, black and even blue, and as measuring 1 to 7 cm, a size the review notes is unheard of among bees.
Vanilla is the only orchid that bears fruit.
A 2022 local news item marking this day called vanilla the only fruit-bearing member of the orchid family. Kew's own claim is narrower, that vanilla is one of the only orchids producing fruit with huge economic value, and Kew elsewhere describes the fruiting capsule of another orchid, Cycnoches chlorochilon, which holds almost four million seeds.
Vanilla flavored on an ice cream tub means real vanilla.
Under the federal ice cream standard, vanilla flavored is the name required when a natural flavour and an artificial one simulating it are both present and the natural one predominates. The plain word vanilla is reserved for a product with no artificial flavour at all.
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No, it is an unofficial observance, so schools, banks and offices stay open. No document naming the day appears in the Federal Register.
COLOPHON
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