Spices of life: A new breed of spice traders are bringing exotic, authentic flavours to North American palates | National Post

They are also pioneers of independent spice sourcing, a new generation of spice traders who work directly with farms, pay the farmers fairly, and cut out traditional middlemen. And it is disrupting the $11 billion global spice business.

For the de Vienne’s, independent spice sourcing is a business, but it’s also about acknowledging the people and communities that grow spices, and the knowledge and traditions behind them. The five-time authors say spices should be understood at the same level of detail as vintage wines, with factors such as geography, soil and micro-climates contributing to quality and variation.

Võ Ngọc Dũng, 25, is a pepper farmer in Da Lak, Vietnam, who harvests organic Ea Sar Black Pepper, a local species that has tasting notes of dried fruit. Along with his co-op partner, Vuong Huu Thanh, Dũng also grows coffee, avocado, and banana on their eight acres. He says black pepper is prone to disease and growing it organically is especially difficult. He and Thanh uses nitrogen-reducing plants and trees to support the pepper vines.

Black peppercorns grow like grapes, bunched on climbing vines, and harvest requires hand collection from ladders.

Dũng is partnering with Ethan Frisch, co-founder of Burlap and Barrel, a New York fair-trade importer. Frisch is transparent with his farmers about the premium prices paid for spices in North America. Burlap and Barrel sells 60 grams of Dũng’s Ea Sa Pepper for $9, and Purple Peppercorns are $13.

Globally, pepper prices are at some of their lowest in a decade, as Southeast Asian pepper saturates the pepper market. Dũng hopes to differentiate his organic crop from others in Vietnam, who use chemicals and pesticides for maximum yield. This year, Frisch purchased his entire Purple Peppercorn harvest from Dũng.

It’s increasingly rare for people across the world to be full-time farmers anymore

The commercial spice supply chain is broken, Frisch contends, with stockpiling and large corporations taking advantage of price fluctuations.

“If you’re trying to figure out whether you can trust that a spice company is actually sourcing directly from farmers, ask them to tell you the names of some of their partner-farmers. If they can’t name them, they probably don’t know who they are,” says Frisch. Since 2016, Frisch and his co-founder Ori Zohar have paid over $1 million direct to family farmers.

Mohammad Salehi was a farmer once, and a military linguist before he became the CEO of Heray Spice, an organic saffron company in Chicago encouraging Afghan farmers to raise saffron instead of opium poppies. Afghanistan is the third-largest producer of saffron and has some of the best quality in the world.

Saffron commands some of the highest spices for any spice, with average global prices ranging from $5,000 to $8,000 a kilogram. Salehi’s family farmed saffron for generations, so when he encountered the poor quality of saffron in North America after his move to Chicago, he started selling his family’s product to restaurant chefs.

Spices are a forgotten category and don’t get the same scrutiny that other supply-chain industries, like clothing, seafood, and produce receive, says

Shawn Mcdonald, executive director of Verite, an Amherst, Mass., non-profit that works to eliminate labour abuses in corporate supply chains.

He says that an expectation for transparency should be higher than simple feel-good imagery when it comes to analyzing agricultural supply chains.

“It’s increasingly rare for people across the world to be full-time farmers anymore, and so arrangements for meeting labour needs are getting even more complicated,” says McDonald. The challenges are made worse by the reliance of farmers worldwide on piece-rate and quota production and payments systems, which facilitate and conceal abuses.

The Mumbai native prints harvest and mill dates on her spices. Five ounces of Pragati turmeric from Prabhu Kasaraneni’s third-generation organic farm in Andhra Pradesh retails for $13. “We know spices are freshest for the first 18 months,” said Kadri. Although her supply was disrupted the first five months of the pandemic, business has grown five-fold, and she will be doubling her spice selection in the coming year.

“When we tried to cook the spices that we got at grocery stores, things were off, the flavour, the aroma, the colour, and we thought we were doing something off. Our immigrant friends talk of many experiences like this. They talk of forgoing a crucial spice for a particular dish because what they found in the store was just really bad.”

Bandaranayake launched Cinnamon Tree Organics with her husband when she moved from Calgary to Maryland. She now imports cinnamon, moringa, and roasted and unroasted curry powders. “When we visited Sri Lanka, and we were introduced to these spice farmers and bought spices from them and started cooking, we noticed the difference right away.”

Bandaranayake wants North Americans to be fearless in their use of spices. She encourages creative ideas such as using turmeric in macaroni and cheese. She hopes that sourcing from small farmers, and sharing spices from her home country with consumers inspires people to understand Sri Lankan food and culture.

Natalie Jesionka is Fellow in Global Journalism at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.