Sept. 23, 2021

The search for a gift ended up leading Taylor Ernster to create one of the nation’s fastest-growing businesses.

And it starts with a vanilla bean.

“It’s a weird item,” acknowledged Ernster. “Not many people even know what a vanilla bean is.”

As he describes it, “it’s like a string bean – a green bean – but it’s black or brown.”

He discovered them back in 2014 after looking to purchase vanilla to make gifts for friends and family.

“What we ended up finding was vanilla was very expensive and anything in-store was extremely inferior quality. It wasn’t good. And it was very overpriced,” he said.

“I found the market online. I couldn’t believe how many people were buying vanilla beans.”

Vanilla beans are the key to making vanilla extract. The commercial variety can include additives such as sugar that many people don’t want, Ernster said.

“They’re looking for pure vanilla extract. When you make it yourself, it’s alcohol and beans.”

But first, you need the beans.

Enter Vanilla Bean Kings, which Ernster launched shortly after his own search for vanilla. The Tea native and SDSU economics graduate had learned about internet-driven business at Weisser Distributing, where he started in the shipping department “but quickly moved from there to finding products online they could bring in,” he said.

After discovering a Facebook group with 60,000 members dedicated to discussing how they make vanilla extract, Ernster sensed he’d found a market for his own venture.

“I had an idea how the e-commerce world worked, so I knew everything had to move pretty quick, and it seemed like a good product people responded well to,” he said. “Who doesn’t love vanilla? This smells absolutely amazing.”

And it’s “fun to make,” he added. “A lot of older ladies make it with their grandkids as a project. And vanilla goes in anything, any baking dessert, you put in vanilla extract, and it tastes better.”

Flavor can vary based on origins of beans, different types of alcohol and types of extract.

He ended up buying vanilla beans from Madagascar, “and it sold pretty fast” on his new website.

He went to the country in 2019 for about three weeks, “and we learned a lot,” he said, adding he also imports from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Ecuador and Uganda.

Ernster left his job in 2014 to flip houses and work on Vanilla Bean Kings, which, at the time, was still out of his basement. It moved out of the house in 2016 to a shared office space in Hartford before realizing that wasn’t big enough either. He moved into a different Hartford building and recently broke ground on his next one – a nearly 11,000-square-foot space in the community’s Western Meadows Industrial Park.

Much of the building will be warehouse space, which is necessary because the Madagascar season shuts down half the year, requiring a stockpile of inventory.

“We import vanilla products from all over the world,” Ernster said. “We specialize in vanilla products – beans, vanilla paste, vanilla powder – anything that has vanilla in it we resell. And we’re trying to educate people in the proper ways to make extract. There actually are FDA guidelines.”

Vanilla also is used in vodka, and Ernster sells to breweries who use it in porters and other beers.

Ninety percent of the business is selling to consumers, though.

“Most people turn it into extract, but a lot of people will slice it open and scrape out the seed and put the seed in a cupcake batter, and you have beautiful cupcakes with tiny flecks of vanilla in it,” Ernster said. “We ship our vanilla all over the world.”

Then came the pandemic, which catapulted Vanilla Bean Kings into a new stage of growth.

Ernster also credits a full-time employee he brought on at the start of 2020.

“I think we spent the first two months reworking everything about our business and changing marketing strategy and dialing that in, and that came right along with COVID when everyone was baking and shopping online, and it took off from there,” he said.

The company, which is incorporated as Roodle LLC, ranked No. 209 on the recently released Inc. 5000 list, with three-year revenue growth of 2,130 percent.

Ernster had read last year’s article on SiouxFalls.Business about the rankings, which recognized the nation’s fastest-growing companies, and put a note in his phone to apply this year.

“We thought we’d do pretty well because we knew … we’d have a high ranking with such explosive growth, but we didn’t think we’d be that high at all.”

Vanilla Bean Kings sells on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and through its own website.

“It’s easy to be found through a bigger company,” Ernster said. “We have ways to remarketing them to get them back to our website as a repeat customer.”

Eventually, you might be able to buy the company’s vanilla products locally in a storefront. But it might be a bit.

“It would be nice,” Ernster said. “Right now, we’re so busy with where we’re at, we haven’t sat down to figure out the first step into retail.”