The world runs on vanilla, or at least I do. Ice cream, milkshakes, cookies, even colognes use vanilla. Up until 2026, Vanilla was “the most popular ice cream flavour” officially by the International Dairy Foods Association. In 2007, Mayu Yamamoto from Japan won an Ig Nobel Prize for finding an innovative process to extract vanillin that no one had ever dared before, by sampling and processing cow poo. 

Figure 1: Donald Trump’s Ig Nobel certificate for medical education, for “using the COVID-19 pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists” when he contacted covid 19 (Improbable research, n.d.). 

Ig Nobel Prize

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awards given by the magazine “Annals of Improbable Research”, not to be mixed up with the prestigious “The Nobel Prize” created by Alfred Nobel. Ig Nobel Prizes are given every year, and have been awarded since 1991. Award ceremonies have been hosted at different universities around the world, e.g. Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University and this year in Zurich, with unique traditions during award presentations, such as the audience throwing paper airplanes at the awardees, and explaining a topic in 24 seconds, then summarised to the audience in seven words. Surprisingly, awards are presented and passed on to the awardees by actual Nobel Prize winners, with various categories (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, e.t.c). Along with their certificate and trophy, awardees also receive a prize bank note of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars. 

Past Winners

There are over 600 Ig Nobel laureates in the world, although some awardees have refused to receive their awards. Some famous Ig Nobel winners are: The Royal British Navy who received an Ig Nobel Prize for Peace for stopping whale migration by firing cannons, The Vatican for outsourcing prayers to India, and US Vice president Dan Quayle for demonstrating the need for science education, as he was famous for his confusing and scientifically incorrect public statements. Brian Wansink received an Ig Nobel for his bowl that refills itself as someone eats from it, which found that people ate more when their bowl wasn’t empty, and that an empty bowl causes people to feel more full. This year, Paul Piff and his team received one for psychology, for finding out how wealthier people are more likely to make unethical decisions, and in one of their seven experiments, it was found that the “wealthier” focus group was much more likely to steal candy from children.

Mayu Yamamoto

During her process of extracting vanillin from cow dung, she first mixed the cow dung with a sodium hydroxide to weaken the bonds of lignin inside the cow poo. After this, Mayu put this mixture into a special chamber which heated the mixture to 200 degrees celsius, then cooled it down to find a mixture of vanillin, organic acids, remaining solid dung and sodium. Then they drained the liquid and threw away the solid dung. After some complex acidification, liquid-liquid extraction, evaporation, and crystalisation to find pure vanillin powder, which is somehow much cheaper than how vanilla is produced normally. Now this pure vanillin can be diluted and processed to create any products such as ice cream or fragrances.

Unfortunately due to Japanese food safety regulations, the vanilla extracted from cow poo cannot be used for food. Despite this, her work interested vanilla companies in the fragrance/soap industries and pharmaceutical industry, as vanilla is often used as an overpowering scent that covers other smells, or is also often used to make medicine.

Inspired by her work, a small ice cream shop in Cambridge called Toscanini’s created a celebratory ice cream flavour called “Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist” shortly after her discovery, which brought attention to whether vanilla ice cream could be made from vanillin extracted from cow poo, which turns out to be technically possible but not legal.