Spice Dept - Rupert Derham

0:03Rupert Derham:Hello there and welcome to episode 134 of People Doing Things. Today we're taking a look inside the dustier corners of our kitchen cabinets with Rupert, the founder of Spice Department, the brand redefining the spice aisle through particular quality. As a generation of home cooks, we care about where our ingredients come from, the origins of our olive oil, the provenance of our heirloom beans, our sourdough made locally ideally by someone we could name. But when a recipe calls for smoked paprika or ground cumin, we head to the supermarket aisle and grab whatever generic glass jar is closest. The unfortunate truth, most supermarket spices are already three to five years old before you buy them and by the time they hit your plate the flavours have already started to fade.

0:49Rupert Derham:Rupert lived in Delhi where cooking with vibrant peak season single origin spices changed his relationship with food entirely. When he moved back to the UK the lack of flavor on supermarket spice aisle drove him mad so he decided to do something about it. Sourcing directly from pesticide free farming groups in Indian Sri Lanka spice department gets spices from harvest to kitchen counter in months not years and pays farmers up to 40 % above market price. Wrapped in a beautiful table ready tins courtesy of my branding agency role play with creative director Hugo Ross at the helm, they're designed to bring back a sense of pride to home cooking in more ways than one.

1:30Rupert Derham:In this episode we dive into the world of commodity spice blending, the logistics of building a direct from farm supply chain and why your spice rack is the last blind spot in an otherwise carefully considered kitchen. So put down the dusty jar, grab your pesto and mortar and enjoy. Rupert welcome to People Doing Things, how's it going? Good, thanks Ed. Nice to be here. Good to finally get you on. It's been a long time coming. I guess I wanted to start with like the backstory of Spice Department. I saw that you wrote on LinkedIn the other day that it actually started as a failed cheese company and you were living in Delhi and actually you kind of fell in love with cooking.

2:11Rupert Derham:But the reason that you fell in love with cooking was partly down to the spices and just the complete difference between the spices that you found in India and the spices that we find on our shelves in the supermarket here in the UK. Take us through a little bit of that journey and the origin story for Spice Department. Yeah, so it does sound a bit mad to think that Spice Department started as a failed cheese company, but it really did. And in 2015, I had the slightly wacky idea to move to India, having been there for the first time in 2011, and it got completely under my skin and I just wanted to be involved in India in some way.

2:50and thought that the Indian wine businesses were growing massively and there was a huge kind of spike in consumption of wine. So I thought, well, it goes really nicely with wine. Cheese, actually, you know, when we'd been to India, you couldn't find good British hard cheese. So I thought, oh, there's a slightly wacky idea. And as you do when you're 24, 25, you think, off I go. And packed my bags. My then girlfriend, who's now my wife, said, oh, I'll come with you. So we just packed our bags and off we went to Delhi, set up a company, had contracts with big hotel chains. But then very, very long story short, Narendra Modi came to power.

3:28It was very then hard to get things into the country. So we kind of came back with our tail between our legs. But as you say, you know, I was a good cook before, but I was cooking every day in India and kind of falling in love with going to the market, finding fresh produce. And actually the one thing I noticed was that my food tasted so, so much better than it did when I was cooking at home. And after a bit of soul searching, thinking, well, I'm not a better cook. You know, there's nothing miraculous has happened overnight. It was literally the quality of the spices I was using. So I was going in South Delhi to my local store, in Uday Park, capital stores, and I was buying fresher spices.

4:05And when we came back with, you know, after the business going down, we kind of, I was cooking the same recipes and really struggling to recreate that flavor. and it was all to do with the spices so walking into any supermarket in the country I just couldn't

4:20Rupert Derham:find spices that tasted the same yeah it's quite weird because we're obsessed with ingredients we're obsessed with provenance but spices always seem to be a little bit overlooked or a bit forgotten about yeah and I think there's a couple of reasons for that one is access like we don't have a choice so we've been sold something that doesn't taste as good and we think you know a lot of people I speak to you know when I show them a tin of our turmeric our cumin our black pepper and they they smell it they taste it they think oh is this what turmeric actually tastes like and I think people have just become accustomed to something that doesn't really taste of anything and secondly you know it's it's all about then building this kind of the confidence in using spices and actually I think you know having our eyes open to things is very important and you know the spice trade and we don't want to get too far into the kind of the history and the complexity of the spice trade but that's what this is all about and actually for many many many years the big boys have been bringing in spices buying them as cheaply as possible taking years in the supply chain so in essence what you're getting at the end is is no better than dust and I think you know when you start to understand the kind of the science behind what you're tasting and what you're tasting is a volatile oil over time that oxidizes and disappears that's the kind of the heart of everything we do I am I have this phrase that I use and it drives me most mornings like I am relentlessly obsessed with the flavor of the spices we import and it's like it's all about flavor the insight that stood out most to me when we were discussing spice department in the early days was that the spice being three to five years old before it hits your plate yeah now you're think oh well if you put anything else that was that old on your plate yeah you'd be ill right yeah completely and not that like and there's always this funny question well spices never go off and I remember helping my mother-in-law move house and we found some nutmeg from 1975 in the back of the drawer and it was still kind of okay yeah but it doesn't didn't taste anything and I think that is the kind of the the sad reality of it is because we tend to use a little bit of spice we haven't got the confidence we associate spices with a Friday night curry for the most part we aren't using them on a daily basis and having them in a way that actually entices you to use them and I think part of the the challenge for spice department which is really exciting to solve is actually about using the spice and actually how do we get people to use them more and more and more as a kind of a regular ingredient that they use and I think that's part of it you're completely right about it's kind of like shocking to think that they're that old and it's also shocking to me that if you go into any supermarket now whether it's organic or not you look at the side of pack no one tells you where it's from when it was grown where it was going where it was grown all of this information so you could realistically be buying cumin that was grown in four or five different countries it's been packed together yeah at the moment the supermarket's very much treated like a commodity yeah and what you're trying to do is the opposite completely yeah it's actually about provenance it's about farm to table it's about all of these things that we've seen as great trends in in food recently so i'm not doing anything new but it's just in a the in my mind the last big kind of commoditized category that just needs shaking up and what about some of your more recent headaches with well yeah so yeah yeah so in a business that's gosh only launched fully you know first sale was made in september last year so september september 2025 we've you know we've had a pretty catastrophic mess with a batch that arrived you know and we launched in september sell out within two weeks massive demand wholesale interest we had you know retailers clamoring to get our product and then so pulled forward the next order and obviously the way we work is we have to kind of work four to six months in advance because we're getting the next batch ready and we only import the freshest harvest so it's kind of waiting for the stuff to be harvested and then bringing it over so we pulled forward the next shipment and it arrived just before Christmas there was a massive kind of somehow our shipping agent managed to trick the port health system and get the product out before it had been checked by port health they then tried to put it back in to avoid storage charges they went what's this what's happened here so they just put a big red stamp on and said rejected so we had gosh about 500 kilos of spices sent back to india yeah and that's not only the customers who are waiting for spices that was then future orders kind of going with our tail between our legs to retailers saying yeah you know we promised you all this stuff in september it's actually going to take a few more months and you know it's july now we're only just solving that problem so we've had this kind of headache we've been trying to solve and now we've got more than enough stock here which is fantastic but it's just trying to catch up so you know that for me as a as a fledgling business is the kind of thing that could either send you under or just make you even stronger now we know the process even better we know when the testing is going to happen we know these things we know what the charges can be and it just makes the whole process 10 times easier for us now how did you stay so like resilient in that time of crisis because i think if something like that happened to me I would I think I'd be pretty winded it's really funny I was talking to my wife stressed and then yeah yeah yeah no completely I was talking to my wife about this um over the weekend I think it's weird that most people don't do this kind of thing like the way I think my brain works is cry for 30 seconds pick yourself up and carry on and find a solution I'm always like solutions focused and I you know I have had proper jobs where I've sat in an office before but I just never really it never worked so I find it weird that the majority of people do that not this because I think this is so natural and I weirdly quite like it I like the mess if it goes well it feels like it's not right it's too easy you know it's too easy and actually the fun of it and the challenge of it the problem solving the squeaky bum time with invoices coming out of your ears and you haven't got the money to pay people and that's where having the right partners and the right conversations and trying to be as open and honest with people and actually it goes back to what drives you and I think if you have a really strong mission a really strong set of values behind what the business is that keeps us on the path and keeps us like putting one foot in front of the other but yeah I'm not going to lie there's been moments certainly this year where I thought this is stupid quite hard like what am I doing what are we doing like we have something amazing we know people want it but and then it makes you think well there's a reason that this commoditized category hasn't been looked at because it's really hard yeah yeah that's our great advantage as well i also know that you've you know you've got your first born monty yeah another one the way on the way soon you must have a pretty high tolerance for risk as a founder yeah well i think you know how do you settle that score sometimes well it's having a really good wife a really good support system um you know the day that monty was born under the previous brand name indian spice company where we were doing kind of markets and doing some market testing alice my wife was labeling tins then her waters broke and then two weeks later monty was strapped to my chest then we were at markets and it's like it's funny because my wife is not she's the most risk averse sensible she won't mind me saying this person you could ever meet incredibly kind of thorough detail thinks about things really carefully and I'm just two feet let's jump but actually she understands what I'm trying to do she's fully brought in you know she's been on the complete journey with us and I think it's you know having parents that get it as well that when you can sit and cry on their shoulder and think mom I'm nearly 40 what am I doing this is a joke yeah but actually having something yeah so it's just about having a really good family but also So just ignoring the noise in your head and relishing the challenge.

12:38Rupert Derham:If I think about what's the category job to be done, you've got a fairly stale category on shelves. There have been some kind of spice players, but it's always felt like almost too much in the gift world. And they actually haven't really done enough to land the tastemakers. and I think what's exciting about spice department is there's been so much thought and detail and pushing for it to be better to be different to sweat the small stuff sometimes because actually that incremental yeah the things that you don't think are going to make the difference when you add them all up they really do completely and I think that bit of landing both quality having a great product but also doing things like the tins yeah having the colors yeah having the way that it shot yeah proving that you've gone and met these people and you've taken beautiful photos and documented it in a certain way i think it means that it you're not only creating a better product for the market but you're also helping people to fall back in love with it because they can see that it looks great on a kitchen counter and then they want to cook with it and they want to share it with their friends completely and i think you know to your point around like the innovation in the category you know there's obviously been some blend companies that have come and done some interesting work but that's a very different thing to what we do there's been the you know the the thing around the gifting and i think there's some really successful businesses out there that focus on the foodie gifts but you know the simple question i'm trying to solve is how do we make this cumin taste better like how do we find better cumin and it's not about packaging it and pretending that what's inside tastes better it's actually just about the quality of the the product and I think you know to the point about tins like storing something in a tin not a glass jar going through that effort making it square making it feel different you know the side of every spice jar you have in the in your kitchen says store in a cool dark place and we stick it in a glass jar it just seems completely counterintuitive to me so it's like It's in a tin, so it's already dark, so it can be left on the shelf, on the counter rather.

14:48And actually making it counter worthy, that was one of the first things I think we spoke about was about kind of how do we get this product out of the back of a spice rack, out of the back of a cupboard and onto the table and actually have it there as like the centerpiece. And I think that's the really kind of exciting thing. And, you know, as you say about the like the tastemakers and trying to appeal to them, the only way you can appeal to them is to have a product that tastes bloody good. And actually, the minute you do that, it's kind of relatively simple. It's then about the stuff around it and the brand building and the world building around it.

15:21But if the product's not good, no one's going to buy it.

15:24Rupert Derham:Yeah. There's a nice thread from the product story through to the brand world that's been created. That clove can be traced back to the man that picked it off the tree. You know, that is magical for me. there's a lot of brands and especially early stage brands that kind of look to others to copy or to kind of borrow confidence might be a nice term but actually I think one of the things that we've spoken about a bit and especially recently is this idea of like different by design yeah how have you thought about it and how have you followed a sense of conviction with that because in many ways the way it turns up in the world is much more editorial yeah behaving maybe more like a kind of magazine than a pantry brand how do you instill that and and also make sure that as you get bigger that doesn't disappear yeah i think it's one of the key things to everything and actually like having the right people around me to help realize that vision is so key and actually trusting people's perspective on that and I think you know to give Hugo Ross a little bit of a shout out here the the first time I met with him and we talked about you know we had this gray Indian spice company tin and what this could become the first thing he said is you need to behave like a fashion brand he says you need to think editorially you need to think about that and you know that has wavered a couple of times as we moved because you know you lose confidence you gain confidence as a founder but actually I think now where we are eight months into kind of being live I'm even more obsessed with this idea and I use the word editorial far more than I should and I'm sort of not 100 % sure how I define it every time I say it but this kind of editorial perspective thinking about you know not only how we present things on our website but actually how we have a perspective on things and we are as you say different by design I think is the the most interesting thing because the easy thing to do would have been to create something kind of cutesy hand-drawn illustration you know cardamom leaf with a cardamom seed part you know someone a farmer picking the thing and i think there's a there's a time and a place for that in brand building but i'd never thought about brand strategy before and i think probably the first time you and i spoke was a bit of an eye-opener to me and then since that moment this idea of brand like you can have the best looking tin in the world but if the brand around it doesn't make any sense doesn't feel coherent consistent have strong values have a strong perspective it it doesn't mean anything and i think that editorial aspect is becoming more and more about what we do and i think that's really exciting and you know we don't we have been massively inspired by loads of other brands but we don't want to recreate what they're doing i want to create version 3.0 of what they're doing so it's almost so far different and so far into the future that it feels unique and pioneering and leading and challenging in a true challenger sense i think also what's really exciting about it is it allows you to tap into much more audiences you've got an audience of people that really know quality yep and like you're winning them over with the product yeah then there's going to be people that like the editorial aesthetic want to put it on your point like counter worthy yeah they want to put it on the counters but you're also going to people who like the fun and want to engage with it on social yeah who are going okay yeah the brand looks good but also i can do all these amazing things with it so i think you get a really nice cross-section of yeah people that can enjoy it for different reasons yeah completely and i think what was quite interesting we did a little light touch survey recently of our kind of like initial core customer base and the thing that came back really really like screamed at us was our customers know how to cook yeah so we don't need to be feeding them a really basic recipe that uses cumin they what they really want is a fun inspiring exciting thing you know recipe and like yesterday the piece of content we put out was like a burrata with like grated frozen pickle on using some of our spices it's like that for me is what this is exciting and this is this is about it's not about teaching you ed how to make a curry on a friday night this is about oh my god i never thought i could use that spice to do that i wanted to touch on that i always thought and i think wrongly i always thought you would specialize in dishes that were more of a indian southeast asian like curries and stuff like that i always thought that was what you would focus on but actually you've not really done that at all and you've done anything much put any yeah maybe one and it's really it's really interesting and i think unusual for me because i wouldn't have expected it in some reasons maybe partly because of the previous name and the origin of the spices but actually you've done a great job at the versatility of all the different ways you can use it and i think that makes obviously it's better for frequency but it's also better for just enjoyment well completely and that's twofold isn't it one is the commercial angle which is you know if you only buy cumin once a year and in a store this business doesn't go anywhere because it's really it's a really hard sell and i think actually about the kind of the it's kind of making spices sexy and making them exciting and using them in different ways and if you can inspire someone to think oh god i never thought about that want to do the spicy margarine yeah and just like oh god i can use this cantari chili and actually what's really exciting about that it's like a thai bird's eye chili that they but the farmers grow it on their farms in kerala and actually they just use it in their kitchen and you've got this like really cool link back to them but also it just tastes so good and like nothing you've ever tasted before and i think that's the kind of the the fun element that we can bring is the like expect the unexpected and using spices in a different way and you know it's again and we're lucky that we've managed to get people around us that are challenging us to do that and actually thinking about recipes in a different way like I can't profess to be coming up with all of these ideas myself you know have good people that help us do that but it it's funny when you put us you put something out on social that is a bit wacky and it's a bit weird like this pickle burrata frozen pickle grated burrata and suddenly it takes off you see the engagement and you see it resonating and that's when you think okay we're getting kind of a bit of cut through here that's exciting to build on just thinking about the spices themselves a do you have a favorite b how did you curate your first eight and then your second 12 yeah i always think about how do you get enough of the right spices to be able to cook the dishes that you want yeah to make and also use them at similar kind of paces yeah well i think it might not always be the case no completely and i think the the honest answer around kind of curating the 12 and it was always going to be 12 we had a bit of an issue with getting all 12 in so we started with eight but but the eight made sense.

22:25It's like, this is all you need. This is everything you need in your kitchen to do pretty much everything you need. And if a recipe is telling you need more, it's probably not the best recipe to be following. And it's just that those spices probably don't taste of anything. And so it's about the kind of the familiar, we could have easily launched a load of really wacky stuff and we are gonna bring some more wacky stuff in, which is really exciting, but that's like an add on. You don't wanna be moving away from your core range. you know i've got this really exciting prospect in manipul northeast india where they have a thing called michinga which is like a kind of a szechuan pepper that has that same mouth numbing quality but slightly less citrusy that stuff is really exciting to me as well but actually without you don't want to go too far down that road without having really good cumin really good coriander seeds really good turmeric amazing cardamom and you know yeah black pepper and it's so funny looking at our data the amount of people that just buy black pepper black pepper black pepper

23:17Rupert Derham:because it is we use it so much yeah and there's no good black pepper out there and actually having like you know just the champagne of spices grown in the hills the western guts in kerala and it's just it's magical that's very exciting sort of salivating yeah i don't want to give too much away but that's something we're working on at the moment is actually a really exciting like pepper proposition because i think that struck me a bolt in the blue the other day when i was like oh my god you know to name check malden most people have a box of malden in their kitchen somewhere but could you name the brand that your pepper comes from it's probably your own brand yeah yeah exactly that's exciting yeah um watch the space on that yeah try not to give too many exclusives away in terms of just like reflecting back you launched the spices in september yeah the early days of running your business are obviously some of the hardest yeah i know that you're also fundraising at the moment what would be any like learnings that you'd pass on to other founders or people thinking about experimenting with the same sort of thing well for me it's just do it and just kind of you know I'm probably the amount of advice you see out there which is you in your early 20s you can live with your parents you don't have a mortgage you don't have children that's the best time to start a business I think is kind of right but also So there's no harm in doing it later in life as well.

24:47Like I'm kind of the classic risk-taking founder where I've got a mortgage, I've got a kid, another one on the way.

24:53Rupert Derham:And, you know, if this goes catastrophically wrong, you're kind of like, oh, I don't know what's next. But I think it's about just going into it with your eyes wide open. Know there's going to be really dark moments, but actually the opportunities to have fun and do something interesting. Like we're so lucky that, you know, a huge part of what we do is spent on the ground in India and Sri Lanka, talking to farmers, seeing these things working and having exciting plans for the future about how we can make that even better and how we can bring even more of this incredible product is the thing that drives me.

25:31I'm all about vision I'm all about mission and making you know looking into the future and I think that's the kind of the the driving force if you've got that burning desire to do it it doesn't have to be massively complicated you know it's about seeing a little grain of an opportunity

25:47Rupert Derham:and running with it epic and fundraising is that is that still on the cards or yes it is yeah so So we were very lucky that we found a group of crazy people who were willing to invest in an idea that I had before we did anything. So that real pre-seed, pre-idea, pre-product phase. And I think it still makes me laugh that people are willing to write a check off a bit of this mad idea I've had for a number of years. And we are now raising again to kind of capitalize on the success we had. I can't talk about too much of what's coming, but there's some really exciting things which really validates what we do.

26:27Some really kind of marquee retailers and some really great listings coming, which, you know, for me, is just kind of the exciting part, which is kind of like, well, yeah, they're getting it finally. And actually these people are seeing, you know, people are starting to see what I've always thought and always believed. And it kind of really validates the business in that respect. But, you know, those bits of the business are the bits I kind of, they're a bit like necessary evils, aren't they? You want to do it, you need to do it because it helps you grow. But actually, I want to just be thinking about the guy picking my clothes and how I can think about when the next harvest is, how the harvest is going, looking at the weather, thinking, oh, God, like, we're going to have this crazy hot at the moment, so what's that going to do to our next harvest?

27:12And thinking about those problems rather than thinking about, oh, I've got a couple of invoices to pay.

27:17Rupert Derham:Yeah. If you follow this different by design mantra, what does Spice Department look like in five years? And what did the aisle start to look like? Yeah, so I think the Spice Isle, if we kind of take Spice Department out of it for a sec, is in most major grocery stores across the UK, consumers that want to upgrade have an option to upgrade. So, you know, you see it in most categories now. You've got your kind of your own brand. You've got an incumbent sitting there who's done a bit of the pre-monetization. but then you've got a premium player sitting on top and I think for spices that would be my dream for the aisle is actually I can stand in front of any spice shelf in a supermarket and I can make a choice between something that's fully traceable freshly harvested incredibly tasty a little bit more expensive but for very good reason versus the others and I think that's where I see the spice aisle changing and I think spice department has the power the opportunity to kind to change that but it's just going to take a few years yeah well thank you so much for coming on people doing things that was a pleasure my pleasure thank you ed that was rupert durham founder of spice department on people doing things as always i've been your host ed little and if you are feeling particularly generous of spirit reviews go a long way to helping this podcast grow so please head over to spotify or apple and leave one people doing things on a mission to celebrate and inspire the entrepreneurs of tomorrow