18-03-2025
- Business
- National Geographic
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.
