Vanilla flavoring in food may be achieved by adding vanilla extract or by cooking vanilla pods in the liquid preparation. A stronger aroma may be attained if the pods are split in two, exposing more of a pod's surface area to the liquid. In this case, the pods' seeds are mixed into the preparation. Natural vanilla gives a brown or yellow color to preparations, depending on the concentration. Good-quality vanilla has a strong aromatic flavor, but food with small amounts of low-quality vanilla or artificial vanilla-like flavorings are far more common, since true vanilla is much more expensive.

A major use of vanilla is in flavoring ice cream. The most common flavor of ice cream is vanilla, and thus most people consider it to be the "default" flavor. By analogy, the term "vanilla" is sometimes used as a synonym for "plain". Although vanilla is a prized flavoring agent on its own, it is also used to enhance the flavor of other substances, to which its own flavor is often complementary, such as chocolate, custard, caramel, coffee, cakes, and others.

The cosmetics industry uses vanilla to make perfume.

The food industry uses methyl and ethyl vanillin. Ethyl vanillin is more expensive, but has a stronger note. Cook's Illustrated ran several taste tests pitting vanilla against vanillin in baked goods and other applications, and, to the consternation of the magazine editors, tasters could not differentiate the flavor of vanillin from vanilla; however, for the case of vanilla ice cream, natural vanilla won out.

Medicinal uses

In an in-vitro test, vanilla was able to block quorum sensing in bacteria. This is interesting because in many bacteria quorum sensing signals function as a switch for virulence. The microbes become virulent only when the signals indicate that they have the numbers to resist the host immune system response. The essential oils of vanilla and vanillin are sometimes used in aromatherapy. In old medicinal literature, vanilla is described as an aphrodisiac and a remedy for fevers; these purported uses have never been scientifically proven. It has been shown that vanilla increases levels of catecholamines (including adrenaline), and as such can also be considered mildly addictive.