San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bringing direct trade to the spice route
Bay Area firms take equity, and vibrant global flavors, into the home kitchen
In the Bay Area, restaurant chefs and home cooks alike are known for caring about where their food comes from. They can name the ranch that raised their pork, the farm that grew their salad greens. But what about their spices?
For many, spices are colorful powders that come from somewhere.
“Coffee used to just be black coffee. Now people are like, ‘I want a Guatemalan, shadegrown medium roast,’ ” said Ori Zohar, who cofounded singleorigin spice company Burlap & Barrel in San Francisco. “There’s beauty in a transparent supply chain, and it just hasn’t happened with spices.”
But that’s starting to change — and fast. A number of directtrade spice companies have emerged across the country over the past few years, prioritizing flavor and equity over profits. These companies are traveling to spice farms in India, Vietnam and Afghanistan, finding ambitious farmers growing a superior product and paying them as much as 10 times more than the commodity market. Three of these spice companies are in the Bay Area — a fitting extension of the region’s farmtotable mentality.
These entrepreneurs say the spice trade hasn’t changed much since the imperialist days of Dutch ships crossing the globe, though it’s not as bloody anymore. What remains is a complex system of multiple traders, exporters and importers, with spices trading hands anywhere from five to 20 times between the farmer and the retailer. The middlemen tend to make the most money, with farmers getting pennies on the dollar.
Cutting out these middlemen is the goal of companies such as Diaspora Co. in Oakland, Noble House Spice in San Rafael and Burlap & Barrel. While Noble House is a wholesaler, Diaspora and Burlap & Barrel primarily sell directly to home cooks.
“It’s taken the rise of global travel, ease of movement, ease of trade across borders — there have been a lot of things that have come together to make it possible to run a specialty food business and build a farmtotable supply chain globally,” said Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Co.
Bay Area spice entrepreneurs also cite technology, such as WhatsApp and Google Translate, as key
developments allowing relationships with farmers overseas to thrive. But that doesn’t answer the question of why this ethical spice industry took so long to begin compared to fairtrade chocolate and coffee companies, which are now widespread.
Spices are a lot more complicated — it’s hundreds of crops instead of one like cacao, said John Beaver, owner of Oaktown Spice Shop, which stocks singleorigin spices at its stores in Oakland and Albany.
“It’s a bigger field but it’s not a bigger market,” Beaver said. “Even if you were to do just peppercorns, you could do dozens of different kinds of peppercorns.”
The overwhelming nature of spices caused Javeri Kadri to start small. Frustrated by the explosive popularity of turmeric in the Bay Area due to wellness gurus like Gwyneth Paltrow who disregarded its historical and cultural uses in India, the former BiRite Market employee booked a oneway ticket to her native Mumbai to immerse herself in turmeric in its appropriate context.
She showed up at the Indian Institute of Spices Research, looking to learn about different strains of turmeric and find the very best. She returned to Oakland, and in 2017 launched Diaspora Co., , where her first harvest of turmeric — vividly colored, unusually earthy and balanced with buttery notes — sold out in about three hours. While the commodity market price for
1 kilogram of turmeric in India was about 35 cents, Javeri Kadri paid $3.50 per kilo.
“The fact that people are willing to go to an obscure website to buy one thing for their pantry they use once a month, I was surprised,” she said with a laugh.
That trend has continued, even as she’s slowly brought on new spices like heirloom cardamom and chiles. She thought her last black pepper harvest would last seven or eight months; it sold out in three.
Noble House also launched in 2017, an effort from three Bay Areaborn siblings and one of their husbands, a chef who has worked in Michelinstarred restaurants. In a sense, it’s an extension of their parents’ nonprofit, Roots of Peace, which has focused on agricultural development to rebuild communities in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
“We were raised in a way that social impact is just what we have to do. It’s part of our DNA,” said Noble House’s Kyleigh Kuhn.
Noble House zeroes in on women and other marginalized farmers, working with them to develop new practices and walking them through paperwork. Most recently, they started collaborating with a group in Syria to bring true Aleppo pepper to the U.S., which is tricky when the region is in conflict. They have to route the pepper to a neighboring country first to pass through customs.
“It’s a complicated process. For anyone not used to doing it, it’s an impossible task,” said Tucker Kuhn, Kyleigh’s brother. “It probably doesn’t make too much sense in terms of the investment and time, but it’s a passion.”
Burlap & Barrel, meanwhile, has a classic Bay Area origin story. Zohar moved to San Francisco to launch a mortgage startup several years ago. Venturebacked and fasttracked, it quickly grew to 100 employees. But due to a predatory investor, Zohar said he had to shrink the company and rapidly sell in 2017.
Around the same time, he heard from an old chef friend in New York, Ethan Frisch, who wanted Zohar’s entrepreneurial perspective on some spices he’d picked up while living in Afghanistan. Frisch flew out to San Francisco, and Zohar remembers setting up a meeting at one of the city’s top restaurants, fanning out little unmarked baggies of spices, including black cumin seeds so tiny you don’t even need to toast or grind them, foraged in the mountains.
“We realized that if chefs who have access to all the best ingredients in the world were getting so excited about spices that he had brought back in his checked bags, then there was a real business here,” Zohar said.
With Burlap & Barrel, their plan was to bootstrap and slowly build relationships; they now work with farmers in 12 countries.
What comes out of these relationships are better spices than the stuff you find in most grocery stores. They’re fresher, brighter, with aromas so intense that Zohar recommends home cooks start with half the amount of spice a recipe calls for.
Some highlights from Burlap & Barrel include those black cumin seeds Frisch brought back from Afghanistan and Turkish oregano buds to use in place of the more common leaves, tiny little flowers with a slightly bitter edge. And there are hardertofind spices, too, like Turkish black Urfa, a chile that’s fermented until it beckons with flavors of raisin, molasses and tobacco.
Certainly, they’re more expensive than conventional spices — a small jar of organic ground cumin at Safe
“There have been a lot of things that have come together to make it possible to run a specialty food business and build a farmtotable supply chain globally.”
Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Co.
way runs $4.99, while the same size jar of Burlap & Barrel’s foraged cumin costs $9.99. Singleorgin spice companies tend to rebuke fairtrade certification because the process costs money, and they’d rather that money go to farmers, said Beaver.
Noble House’s most popular product is a lateharvest pepper from Vietnam. While most farmers harvest black pepper early to protect it from winds and birds, these farmers leave it for weeks longer so it turns burgundy in color and develops natural sugars.
“It’s like a green banana versus a ripened banana,” said Kyleigh Kuhn. “It’s beautifully expressed, more floral, much more sweet.”
Diaspora rose to national prominence because of the quality of its turmeric, but the flavor alone isn’t what made it so successful. Javeri Kadri’s story as someone who didn’t feel represented in the food industry drew in diverse members of the diaspora community at large. “Somehow a jar of really beautiful spices can help them feel seen,” she said.
With home cooks playing around in their kitchens and digging through their cupboards during the coronavirus, these companies are still in pretty good shape. While Burlap & Barrel sold to restaurants and some small specialty markets, 50% of business was home cooks ordering off its website — and that side of the business has skyrocketed during the pandemic.
But the coronavirus threatens international supply chains — even extremely short ones. Burlap & Barrel is still waiting on shipments in Guatemala, Vietnam and India, with no indication of when they’ll arrive. India is particularly concerning since it’s on a complete lockdown until at least May 3.
“We’re really nervous a shipment of our product will not leave the country or not be accepted in America and just be stuck on the water,” Zohar said.
Diaspora works exclusively with farmers in India — Javeri Kadri was actually in the middle of a threemonth sourcing trip when the pandemic struck. She left on the secondtolast flight out of India.
This was set to be a big year for Javeri Kadri. On her trip to India, she planned to bring on four more spices and partner with a factory there so she could control sterilization and packaging for all of the farms she buys from in one place. When she got back to Oakland, she planned to open a new warehouse — she currently operates out of her house — that would double as a cafe and retail shop.
Many of those plans are on hold. But the farmers she works with are safe and healthy, and she feels fortunate that 80% of Diaspora’s business was already direct to consumer.
“For a week, I was crushed that my revenue projections and new spice launches were all for naught, but I quickly started to see this tremendous silver lining,” she said.
Basically, she told herself to stop worrying and instead figure out how to be of service to her farmers during the coronavirus. The result was asking customers to preorder spices now, knowing they won’t receive them until India’s lockdown ends. Javeri Kadri was able to pay farmers for the rest of the year and expand health care coverage and insurance to all of Diaspora’s farmers and laborers, with the additional goal of raising $10,000 for an emergency fund for all of the farms to share.
Javeri Kadri hopes to be an example of how things can look in the modern global spice industry.
“The spice trade was always dominated by folks in power. Folks in power weren’t the primary consumers of spice and not the people who really understood the culture and ancient legacy of spice,” she said. “The next wave is cultural ownership and taking back power.”