Vanilla beans, HS 0905.10 — the global bean trade in December 2025, from the customs records.
A complete SeaLines monthly report, exactly as sent to the client — 17 pages, every one of the month’s 123 filings read one by one, nothing sampled. Only the client’s details are changed.
- Total export value
- $2.38m
- 123 shipments, 1–31 December 2025
- Typical price
- $49.50/kg
- middle half of trade: $26.85 to $88.50
- Destination markets
- 34
- 99% of filings name the buyer
- Exporters
- 60
- five of them account for 85.8% of value
What the month showed
Five findings from the December report
Summarised from the report’s eight sections. Each finding names the filings behind it; the tables are in the PDF above.
- Product
- HS 0905.10, vanilla, neither crushed nor ground
- Period
- 1 to 31 December 2025
- Evidence
- 123 customs filings · 99 bills of lading
- Origins
- All countries
- Prepared by
- SeaLines research team
- 01
The price to build a bulk offer around
Bulk vanilla beans sold to US food manufacturers at $49.50 to $54.71 per kilogram. That is the price to work from — not the all-market median. Ugandan beans reached the same kind of buyer at $28.18 to $32.14: about forty per cent less, because of where they came from, not their grade. That's the floor any Indonesian or Papuan offer has to defend.
- 02
A market that rests on two buyers
Two buyers took 64 per cent of the month's value. One bought five lots totalling 16,580 kilograms from a single Indonesian exporter in one week; the other bought three identical 7,500-kilogram lots from one Ugandan exporter on the 9th, 16th and 23rd. Any approach to this market has to start from that fact.
- 03
The clearest early warning in the data
The third of those identical Ugandan lots was priced at $32.14, against $28.18 for the two before it — same weight, same supplier, same route. A fourteen per cent rise inside two weeks, with nothing else changed, is a supply signal, not a negotiation. The report recommends re-checking prices against it every month.
- 04
A second product under the same code
Twelve filings declared at under $5 per kilogram made up 27 per cent of December's weight but only 1.1 per cent of its value: flavour powder moving between related companies. Anyone sizing this market by tonnage gets a number that is badly wrong — in a predictable direction.
- 05
What the data can't tell you
Madagascar — normally the world's largest vanilla origin — appeared in only four courier parcels. That's a gap in the data, not a market finding, and the report says so plainly rather than letting the reader assume Madagascan supply has collapsed.
Section 7
What we recommended, as issued
- 1.Price Indonesian bulk planifolia at $49 to $52 per kilogram for US food manufacturers. Don't benchmark against Ugandan prices.
- 2.Treat the Ugandan price rise as an early warning and re-check prices monthly.
- 3.Approach the two European buyers who rely on a single supplier with a security-of-supply pitch, not a price cut.
- 4.Don't size this market by tonnage. Size it on the $25-to-$60 band: 55.3 tonnes and $2.05 million.
- 5.Check Madagascan supply from other sources before drawing any conclusion about world availability.
Written for a seller of beans to the industrial market. A buyer would flip the price recommendations. These are informed opinions on the evidence available on the date of issue, not guarantees of results.