Does your vanilla ice cream have beaver goo in it?

Are there beaver secretions in your vanilla ice cream?

The short answer: Probably not.

News articles or food influencers on social media might have you believe that castoreum, a yellow, syrupy substance from the castor sacs near a beaver’s anus, is found in your everyday vanilla-flavored products, disguised as “natural flavoring.” According to some of these sources, castoreum is an ingredient in everything from ice cream to strawberry-flavored oatmeal.

But experts say this couldn’t be further from the truth. While people have used castoreum for medicinal purposes and, yes, to flavor perfumes and foods since ancient times, today there’s almost nothing in the grocery store today that contains castoreum.

“It turns out that the stuff is incredibly expensive, because it’s rare; there's no way it’s in your ice cream,” says Michelle Francl, a chemist at Bryn Mawr College who studies the science of food. Meanwhile, she says, in 2020 about 16 million pounds of vanilla extract—collected from vanilla orchids, a large group of flowering plants—was produced worldwide, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. (Read more about the history of vanilla.)

That said, castoreum still exists in niche products such as bäversnaps, a Swedish liquor, according to the 2022 book Beavers: Ecology, Behaviour, Conservation, and Management by Frank Rosell and Róisín Campbell-Palmer. In total, the U.S. consumes less than 292 pounds a year of castoreum, castoreum extract, and castoreum liquid, according to the latest edition of Fenaroli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients.

To harvest castoreum, trappers kill beavers and remove their castor glands, which are dried and crushed. They then use alcohol to extract castoreum, similar to how vanilla is removed from the plant, Francl says.

Versatile 'medicine'

For over 2,000 years, people have turned to castoreum to cure all sorts of maladies, including fevers, stomach issues, and mental illnesses. The secretions were also used in soaps and creams, and at one point was added to cigarettes to enhance the scent. Hippocrates even wrote about castoreum’s healing properties of castoreum in 500 B.C.

“By the Roman period, it was a stock part of people’s pharmacopeia,” says Francl.

Castoreum’s popularity as medicine likely has something to do with its chemical makeup. According to the 2022 book, castoreum can contain more than 75 different chemical compounds—an unusually high diversity.

The molasses-like material also contains salicylic acid, or aspirin, which can alleviate pain. Castoreum also has fatty acids like those in expensive skin creams. And some of its molecules are structurally similar to vanillin, the compound in vanilla orchids that’s responsible for the trademark vanilla taste. (Learn more about how vanilla is produced in São Tomé and Príncipe.)

Unfortunately, the demand for castoreum came at a cost. It was a byproduct of the centuries-long fur trade, which decimated North American and Eurasian beaver populations, nearly rendering both species extinct by the 16^th century in Europe and the 19^th century in North America.

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A communication tool

Of course, castoreum plays a vital role in beavers’ everyday lives.

To mark their territory, both beaver species deposit mud piles on the ground and excrete castoreum on top. This serves the threefold purpose of elevating the odor, adding moisture to the scent to make it more potent, and protecting the smell from rising water levels, according to Dietland Müller-Schwarze in his 2011 book The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer.

While both males and females have castor sacs, adult males in a family are most likely to leave scent markings in strategic locations—like the pathways of other beavers—to send the message that this land is taken.

Indeed, when Campbell Palmer smells castoreum in her research in Great Britain, she knows right away “there’s probably two families here, and they’re telling each other, ‘This is the line. This is my boundary,’” says Campbell-Palmer, head of restoration at Beaver Trust, a U.K.-based organization dedicated to increasing Eurasian beaver populations. (Read how beavers are bouncing back in Sweden.)

“It’s a very distinctive smell, castoreum … it’s kind of musky, but sweet,” says Campbell-Palmer. “Even if you don’t see beavers about, you know they’re there.”

Related beavers can also recognize their family members’ individual castoreum scents, which is also a useful tool for Campbell-Palmer.

When she wants to trap and relocate a family of beavers, she can extract one animal’s castoreum and put it in a humane trap to attract its relatives. 

“They’re doing very well in Britain,” Campbell-Palmer adds. “They’re adapting readily.” The North American species is also rebounding, thanks to habitat preservation and hunting controls.

A safe substance

If castoreum were ever to appear in something you ate, Francl says not to worry.

“When we’re thinking about food, what really matters is the structures of the molecules,” says Francl. “It doesn’t matter whether it comes from bear or it comes from beaver, it’s the same molecule—it does the same thing.”

The FDA classifies castoreum as “generally regarded as safe,” and a 2007 safety assessment published in the International Journal of Toxicology concluded that “a long historical use of castoreum extract as a flavoring and fragrance ingredient has resulted in no reports of human adverse reactions.”

“I would try it,” Francl says. But “probably not in ice cream.”