When it comes to sustainable spices, ‘single-origin’ isn’t everything

But in researching 2017’s “The Flavour of Spice,” Reshii encountered some details even she wasn’t expecting. Though the country is often cited as the largest spice producer in the world, “India was rather late to the party,” Reshii says. “Black pepper, turmeric and green cardamom are almost definitely native to India,” she explains — but go back far enough and many of the other household spices, which India both consumes and exports in huge volumes, are not.

Not only is the spice trade a global industry, it was also one of the first. That’s how so many of the spices that are foundational to Indian cooking actually made their way there from somewhere else, Reshii explains — sometimes surprisingly recently, as with chiles, brought from Brazil by Portuguese colonizers just five centuries ago. The movement of these flavors has shaped cuisines the world over for thousands of years, and today, some analyses value the global spice market at more than $37 billion. In the U.S., per capita spice consumption has tripled since the 1960s, and demand continues to grow in the wake of a pandemic-era spice boom.

Still, with an entrenched (and often exploitative) global supply chain, direct, transparent, sustainable sourcing has only recently started to make headway. 

A tangled supply chain

The millennia-old spice trade was always extremely lucrative for those who controlled it, but it was the development of colonialism and capitalism that shaped spice supply chains as we know them today. A desire to get around the competition and find a shorter way to the sources of spice was what sent Columbus across the Atlantic, and soon after, drove the Portuguese to sail around the southern tip of Africa and build trading posts from Cape Verde to Mozambique to Goa to Malacca. The Dutch followed, and then the English, both with their own East India Companies (considered some of the world’s earliest corporations). Soon, the goal became to control the lands where the spices were grown and the people who lived there.

In 2008’s “The Taste of Conquest,” culinary historian Michael Krondl writes that a visit to the Rotterdam-based conglomerate Nedspice was a reminder of “how little the spice business has changed.” He saw that the supply chain looked in many ways like it did centuries ago: Spices were predominantly grown by smallholder farmers, who sold to any number of middlemen, who sent the spices along to brokers or auction houses in larger towns and cities. From there, the products were sold — no longer to local merchants or colonial enterprises — but, instead, to international corporations, which imported and then distributed them to their own clients around the world. “Perhaps the biggest change,” Krondl writes, “is that the transportation has been cut from the six or seven months it used to take in the seventeenth century to some two weeks today.”

With commodity spices — the ones that are sold to companies interchangeably, rather than coming from a specific source — it remains a challenge to trace every person or company a product passes through, leaving room for things like poor labor practices to go unpenalized and making quality control difficult. (“Sitting around in warehouses with fluctuating ambient temperatures and humidity levels does not do spices any favors,” Reshii notes.) The convoluted supply chain also means farmers are typically underpaid and sometimes caught in a cycle of debt. Because spices are grown in many regions and represent a broad category — encompassing flavorful seeds, bark, roots, flowers and dried fruits — specific products can have their own unique issues. For example, in light of the ongoing demand for turmeric in the U.S., fueled in part by the wellness industry and no small amount of appropriation, Undark recently reported on the prevalence of an additive called peuri (lead chromate) used by some farmers in South Asia to give their product the distinctive golden glow favored by buyers. Saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, is a common target of food fraud. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor listed cloves from Tanzania, cumin from Turkey, pepper from Vietnam and vanilla from Madagascar and Uganda as goods for which evidence of child labor has been found.

The environmental issues pervasive in industrial agriculture are not absent from the spice industry, either, even though spice farms can be relatively small in scale. Likewise, “Climate change poses significant challenges for spice cultivation,” says Jennifer Boggiss, co-founder and CEO of New Zealand- and Tonga-based Heilala Vanilla. “Many spices, such as cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom and vanilla are native to specific regions with rich biodiversity,” often in parts of the Global South that are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. In India, for example, warming temperatures have already been associated with cardamom blight in the state of Sikkim and decreases in yields of Kashmiri saffron.

Building a better system

In general, “single-origin” means that the product in question was sourced from one place — though the scope of that place can vary. Sometimes, it means everything was sourced from the same growing region; in other cases, as with Diaspora Co., each spice comes from one independently owned farm. (The company has all partner farms plotted on a sourcing map, which links out to information about the individual farmers and ingredients.) Either way, these products represent a level of divestment from the commodity supply chain, in which spices of various ages, from various places, are typically mixed together. But it’s important to remember that not all companies who fit the “single-origin” description will use the term.

There are also other, more formalized labels that can help you buy better spices. The SSI has formalized a “basket” of approved standards, which includes Fair for Life, Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certifications, though these are often better indicators of worker welfare than of environmental efforts (for example, none of the three prohibit synthetic fertilizers or sewage sludge). Some spice companies, including Naledo, Rumi and Heilala, are also registered as public benefit corporations, or B Corps. Organic certifications are common, too, but not every spice farmer can easily get their operation certified — it is often a costly process — even if they are essentially meeting the standards already.

Boggiss cautions that, when shopping, “it’s essential to go beyond the label.” Research where the spices were produced; with vanilla, as with many other spices, “some regions have better sustainability practices than others.” You can also look for companies that provide information about their business model, explain their sustainability framework, name the farmers or suppliers they work with, agree to regular third-party audits or issue annual impact reports. “Transparency is key,” Boggiss says — “so choose brands willing to share details about their sourcing and production practices.”

While you’re at it, it’s also worth reflecting on history and the unjust systems that have been created in the name of these flavors. “To help dismantle that neocolonialist spice trade,” Nareena Switlo advises, “look for brands that are actually managed and owned and operated” by the people impacted by those colonial structures. “Ask yourself, ‘Who can I support?’”