About Us

CV A.L.Purnama Indopanen is a family-running vanilla beans drying facility, suited in West Kalimantan province.

We started out as a small family owned vanilla drying business. Now, several years later, thanks to contacts established with suppliers of green and dried vanilla, we have significantly increased our ability to supply dried vanilla.

As always, we only supply quality vanilla. All vanilla, both dried at our drying station and received from our suppliers, undergoes multi-stage control.

All beans are sterilized with UV light. We select only ripe (8-9 months old) beans, use a Bourbon curing technique that allows us to get beans with a good appearance and a high level of vanillin.

Our blogs

Facts and useful information about vanilla...

Title of the blog

I have been living in Indonesia for over ten years. And I do not live in Bali or Jakarta, where there are a huge number of visitors, but in a small provincial town.
During my stay in Indonesia, I visited all the major islands, communicated and worked together with ordinary people: workshop workers, farmers, etc. And for many people it seems like a unique experience.
And that’s why I’m often asked (because I’m in the vanilla business) why vanilla from Indonesia is of poorer quality, why Indonesians don’t strive to sell better quality products at higher prices. Why are farmers who grow a seemingly very expensive product so poor?
In this video I will try to give you the answers. At least as I understand the situation.

First of all, you need to understand that in Madagascar, the cultivation of vanilla is a matter of national importance, as, perhaps, for Indonesia – palm oil or for Russia – oil. Accordingly, this business is very tightly regulated by special government organizations. They regulate the price of green vanilla and set a minimum export price below which it is simply forbidden to sell. And if you are caught on the poor quality of the goods, then they can completely forbid you to export goods.
So because of the purchase prices for green vanilla are the same everywhere, there is no temptation to cheat: no one will buy unripe vanilla at a lower price. And mature vanilla is not so easy to spoil during drying (although, of course, it is possible).

The set lower limit for the export price makes it impossible (almost) to trade a low-quality product – no one will buy a bad product at a high price, and the whole situation develops in a favor of a high-quality product and a good name.
In Indonesia, the situation is quite the opposite: the vanilla market is completely wild. And since vanilla is still an expensive product, this business attracts all sorts of dark and dishonest personalities, including the mafia, which has no problems with operating cash.
All this creates a very sad situation for vanilla farmers. Let’s start with the fact that in Indonesia, it is almost impossible for an ordinary person (not a civil servant) to take a loan – you need to have something for collateral. Mortgages, as such, are not here either: in order to obtain a loan for the purchase of real estate, you need to mortgage the existing real estate to the bank … Very often, especially in the outback, somewhere in the forest, people grow their products on land that does not belong to them – they can’t arrange property (land) rights registration, because it requires some knowledge, money for registration, for trips to the nearest regional center, where the administration sits, etc.

Accordingly, there are no rights to real estate – no collateral and no development loan.
Therefore, the peasants, as a rule, have nothing but hands and some primitive equipment. There is no phone and, even more so, the Internet to look for buyers, there is no transport to deliver the goods to the nearest transport company. There is nothing at all.
Therefore, farmers are completely dependent on the so-called harvest collectors – people who go around farms and buy crops, including vanilla. They know that apart from them (and their competitors), no one will buy the crop from the farmer and dictate their own conditions and very low price is one of them.
Due to the fact that the harvesters spent money on the road to the farm (sometimes it takes several days off-road, including mountain passes and crossing rivers), he wants to use the trip as efficiently as possible and collect everything that is possible on the farm. This especially affects the quality of vanilla – it’s being harvested all, including unripe beans: there is nothing but water in unripe vanilla beans and vanillin and other aromatic components simply have nothing to form from, no matter how the beans are dried.
Moreover, a way out of this situation is not so easy to find: as a rule, plantations (farms) are small and produce a small amount of beans. In addition, vanilla beans do not all ripen at the same time, but the age of the vanilla pod, as I said, is very important. If you collect only mature vanilla, you will get even smaller amount of beans which is not worth the cost of traveling to the farm.
For the farmer, leaving almost mature pods on the vine (and you can’t store them and wait for a buyer) is a risk of just throwing them away, because as soon as they ripen, they will split and lose all commercial value. It is more profitable for a farmer to sell all the vanilla at a lower price than to try to sell a ripe beans at a higher price… A vicious circle.
This situation is developing on the islands of Maluku and Nusa Tenggara Timur provinces.