The demand for vanilla flavoring has long exceeded the supply of vanilla beans. , the annual demand for vanillin was 12,000 tons, but only 1,800 tons of natural vanillin were produced.Dignum 2001. The remainder was produced by chemical synthesis. Vanillin was first synthesized from eugenol (found in oil of clove) in 1874–75, less than 20 years after it was first identified and isolated. Vanillin was commercially produced from eugenol until the 1920s.Hocking 1997. This chemical process can be conveniently carried out on the laboratory scale using the procedure described by Lampman 1977. Later it was synthesized from lignin-containing "brown liquor", a byproduct of the sulfite process for making wood pulp. Counterintuitively, though it uses waste materials, the lignin process is no longer popular because of environmental concerns, and today most vanillin is produced from the petrochemical raw material guaiacol. Several routes exist for synthesizing vanillin from guaiacol.Van Ness 1983.
