Stand in front of a supermarket's baking aisle and you will usually find two products with confusingly similar names sitting side by side: vanilla extract and vanilla flavouring, sometimes labelled vanilla essence. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is bigger than most labels let on.
What extract legally has to contain
In most regulatory definitions, pure vanilla extract has to be made from real vanilla pods, infused in alcohol, at a minimum concentration. Nothing else is allowed to be doing the flavour work. If the label says extract and nothing qualifies it, real pods were involved somewhere in that bottle.
What flavouring or essence usually means
Vanilla flavouring or vanilla essence carries no such requirement in most places. It is often built from synthetic vanillin, the single dominant flavour compound in real vanilla, produced cheaply from wood pulp lignin or petrochemical sources rather than from a vanilla pod at all. It is not automatically unsafe, but it is a fundamentally different, far simpler product pretending to occupy the same shelf space.
Why the difference actually matters in a dish
Real vanilla pods carry vanillin plus over a hundred other trace aromatic compounds that never made it into a synthetic version. That is why real extract tastes rounder and more complex, while synthetic flavouring tends to taste like one flat note. In a dish with a dozen other ingredients competing for attention, that gap barely registers. In something simple, a custard, a panna cotta, a plain shortbread, it is the difference between the dish tasting genuinely of vanilla and tasting only of sugar.
How to actually tell at the shelf
Read past the front label. Check the ingredients list specifically for the words vanilla bean extractives or vanilla extract, and be wary of a price that looks too low for what a bottle of real extract should cost given how vanilla is actually produced. A cheap bottle claiming to be pure extract is usually cheap for a reason.
Making your own is straightforward with real pods. See the method.