Meet Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Co. Spices. In 2016, Sana booked a one-way ticket home to Mumbai, where she set out to research how she could radically reimagine the system of the spice trade. She found that farmers were not being paid, spices changed hands 10 times before reaching the consumer, and the final spices on your shelf ended up being an old, dusty shadow of what it once was. Something had to change and she decided that she was going to be the one to do it.

So, in the fall of 2017, Diaspora Co. Spices was launched with just one spice, Pragati Turmeric. From that very first day, the big, audacious dream was to grow a radically new, decidedly delicious and truly equitable spice trade, to push a broken system into an equal exchange, and to have a lot of fun doing it.

Today, Diaspora sources 30 single-origin spices from 150 farms across India and Sri Lanka. Diaspora proudly pays their farm partners an average of 6x above the commodity price, providing a living wage. They emphasize the need for sustainability – not only in their product and packaging, but also the health of the earth from which these spices come from – and they focus on community and connecting deeply with the culture and heritage of the countries; which helps us, as the consumers, to feel like we are a part of something bigger than ourselves.