Until the 19th century, Mexico was the homeland of vanilla, as it was the only place with varieties of stingless bees of the Melipona and Trigona genera that pollinated the plants.

It was not until Edmond Albius, a horticulturalist from Réunion (an island in the Indian Ocean about 700 kilometers east of Madagascar) invented a method to pollinate the flowers by hand. Soon after, the natives of Madagascar possessed this skill and turned the island into a vanilla kingdom and the Sava Region into a vanilla coast.