Sana Javeri Kadri wants your spice rack to live up to its potential

Sana Javeri Kadri’s radical quest to disrupt the global spice industry started with one small action. She took aim at golden milk lattes. Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, Javeri Kadri was working in marketing at a large San Francisco grocery store when she noticed the fad sweeping America’s coffee shops. She knew the drink’s key ingredient, powdered turmeric, grew mostly in her native India. But unlike existing varieties of farm-to-table coffee, chocolate, or fruit, there was little visibility into the supply chain. 

When she returned to Mumbai early the following year, Javeri Kadri investigated and realized two things. Some regenerative farmers in India used distinct growing and processing techniques that resulted in varieties far superior to anything she’d seen across Mumbai and California. And yet no farmers seemed to be profiting from turmeric’s newfound vogue among wellness seekers. So she decided to reinvent the supply chain. “That naivete meant that we built something from scratch and made something possible that previously didn’t seem possible,” she says. 

The global spice trade is rooted in more than 500 years of colonialism, marked by long supply chains, little transparency, and farmers paid a pittance for their labor. Spices often sit in transit between grower and grocer for years, losing potency in the process. So Javeri Kadri invested the only money she had—about $3,000 from her tax refund—to buy the freshest turmeric she could find and bring it to California. “I was hand-packing it in my basement and then selling it on the internet,” she remembers. Thanks to a knack for Instagram marketing and a few key contacts in the food world, the business took off. 

Today Javeri Kadri’s Diaspora Co. offers 41 spices, including black peppercorn and cardamom, and spice blends sourced from India and Sri Lanka. Unlike conventional spice companies, Diaspora deals directly with more than 150 farms, reaching thousands of farmworkers while paying them, on average, four times the commodity price for the organic spices they grow. (Fairtrade International, by comparison, pays just 15 percent above market.) The high-quality product allows the company to charge a premium, which has led to more investment in its farm partners. 

Javeri Kadri’s strategy for coaxing people to pay more has been in part to focus on making the difference in quality and potency undeniable. “Before we launch something, we’re buying every single competitor and directly comparing, literally in an unhinged way, to make sure that ours is the best out there,” she says. Her company is continuing to offer customers an unmatched level of transparency, sharing not just information about the farms on which each spice is grown but also harvest dates and contract prices. 

Javeri Kadri says that today one of Diaspora’s primary corporate goals is for its farm partners to be able to pay workers enough to lift them above the poverty line. She estimates that the business will need to grow tenfold to reach that bar. Getting there is mostly a matter of encouraging more people to discover why a beautiful black peppercorn or cardamom pod, like great olive oil or wine, is a thing worth splurging on. “Because we’re sourcing from South Asia, I think there’s a very problematic assumption that it should be cheap,” she says. “That’s basically the effects of colonialism and racism, where we’re devaluing this labor and we’re devaluing the worth of this product.”  

Meanwhile, the company recently expanded into Whole Foods and wholesale distribution. There’s a difference you can taste.