334: Diaspora Co.

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. It started with what is the chai that I love drinking, right? Like all recipes are inherently personal. So we lead with the personal weight. We're not trying to be the perfect chai experience for every South Asian person in the world. You know, the way that I drink my chai and my dad drink my chai are completely different. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Sana Javere Kadri is the founder of Diaspora Co., an equitable and highly delicious spice company paying an average of six times the commodity price to 150 farm partners across India and Sri Lanka. On this episode, Sana impacts exactly how Diaspora has expanded their scope and scale while remaining true to their mission, plus moving back to Mumbai and much more.

1:29Sanna Javeri Khadri, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you. I'm very excited to be sitting across from you. Me too. I feel like you're not often in New York these days, so it's special. Yeah, I moved to Mumbai, right, like about four months ago. So my New York trips are like two a year at this point, so I'm glad we snuck it in. A little farther to get to. A little bit. How has Mumbai been treating you? It's been amazing, I think, personally. I moved away from home when I was 16. So I moved 14 years ago. And, you know, work allows me to be in India quite a bit, about half the year.

2:02But I wanted for it to be a bigger move so that I could spend more time with my family. So I think personally, it's been incredible. I think work-wise, it's going to take some adjusting to because we have half of our team in India who love having me around. I think there's 12 of them in India. But then we have 10 in America. And I think for them, there's still an organizational process vacuum from me being gone that we're going to have to solve for and figure out. But I'm here four or five months of the year still. It's a work in progress, basically. Yeah. And I feel like the time difference must be pretty profound between the two.

2:38It's horrible. Like you cannot name a worse time difference. It's 12 and a half hours. So it's like right as somebody is waking up, the other person is falling asleep. It's not kind. It's like a long distance working relationship. Yeah, I think there's 22 of us all in long distance relationships and it's fairly painful. Oh my God, you need like a group couples counselor. It'll be fine. When you went back to Mumbai, was there like one thing that you had to eat right away? Always. It's pani puri. So puri means it's like a crispy wheat shell. And then you fill it up with, usually it's like sprouts and potatoes with chat masala.

3:13And then you dip it in this like really tangy, like mouth puckering, spicy, sour, pani or water, which is made with cilantro and tamarind and kala namak, which is like black salt. And the best is always eating it fresh at a roadside stall. So essentially, like they make one, you pop it in your mouth, you make one, you pop it in your mouth so that it's like crunchy on the outside and then it explodes in your mouth. So straight off of the plane, I'm going to the roadside pani puri bala. It's the best. That sounds so good. I had that at Damica on the Lower East Side recently, but I've never had it like that fresh.

3:47And I do imagine that like there's no sog at all. It just must be like the perfect ratio and texture. Oh, OK. So I want to talk about your travels because I know that you've been doing development for the Diaspora Co cookbook. And I'd love to know just how that even came to be. Where did the idea come from? I've wanted to write a cookbook since I was 16 years old. You're like a cookbook groupie kind of, right? 100%. Like I have hundreds of cookbooks at my house. The Eat Your Books website is like my favorite website. I think you recommended this to me when I was working at BA in like 2018. And I use it all the time.

4:21It was because of you. And until this moment, I think I forgot that. I feel so proud that I got you onto that. An influencer. Influenza, as they say. But I love the Eat Your Books platform. I use it all the time. But I think that I always knew that it was going to be a cookbook. I don't think I had that like it was either going to be a cookbook that was like my family recipes and more about my story. And I think at, you know, we signed the cookbook deal when I was 27. So we signed it a couple of years ago now. I think there was a feeling of I have a long, wide life ahead of me. And like the cookbook about my family stories will come.

4:58But for now, the magic for me of the past five years has been our relationships with our farm partners at Diaspora. So Diaspora is a spice company, but we work with 140 farmers across India and Sri Lanka. And I visit their homes roughly once a year. Our sourcing team now also visits them really regularly. And what's always stood out to us in our visits is the food, you know, is eating in these incredible farming communities' homes. And so it's like, how is this beautiful pepper called a runya pepper that grows in the hills of Kerala used in traditional northern Kerala cuisine? And it's used in a super peppery, fiery rassam.

5:42It's used, which is like sinus clearing and incredible. Or it's used in, you know, a raw mango fish curry that I had never had before. And so the story kind of came that actually being able to take those recipes from our farm partners and then translate them to work beautifully for American home cooks was the story we most wanted to tell in this chapter of our lives. And so that's what we're doing. I really love that idea. I think that like our spices, especially here in America, have traveled so far to get to us and to think about the way that they're being used by the people that are so close to them and understand the flavor profile so well.

6:20It makes so much sense. And yet it is something that I've never encountered before. And it also just seems like so much work. I would love to know about like, how are you organizing the book? How are you taking these home recipes and making them work for other people? Yeah, it's been a long process. You know, we got the deal early 22. So about a year and a half ago now. And I haven't been able to like commit the time until a month ago. So you've been doing a whole other thing. Trying to run a company. Yeah. But in the book won't come out until 2025. So, you know, it's two years from last week is our pub date.

6:59We have a pretty built out team. So there's myself. I'm sort of the wrangler and the relationship builder, but I'm not a recipe developer and I'm not a chef. So that's where my like absolute superpower, which is Asha Lupe, who's at From Head to Table on Instagram. She's our recipe editor. she is coming with me on these like exhausting travels for the next four months, visiting all of our farm partners. And it's her job to like sit there with her digital scale, measure out every single thing that a farmer is putting in, and then recreate it here in Oakland at our test kitchen and figure out, you know, what are the substitutions we're going to make?

7:39What recipes? So, for example, our saffron farm partner made just on the site, like without even showing us how she made it, Alia made us this beautiful pumpkin chutney that is walnuts, hung yogurt, pumpkin and black cardamom. And they just eat it like as a pickle almost with their rice and dal and curries. And the minute we tried it, we knew that it would be an incredible dip. So it's not going to be exactly, you know, the pumpkin chutney that it is in that Kashmiri household, but it'll be inspired by that. So I think we're also treading the line of where are we going to really, really stick to something that is true to a family recipe and tell people that, you know, yes, it's a two day adventure to make this, but it's worth it.

8:24And where are we going to take inspiration? we also we have a photographer traveling with us everywhere Malati who's been on our team now for about two and a half years we have a researcher who's doing like tons of background research into each family each cuisine each region because I think there's such a feeling for me that as the translator of regional South Asian cuisine like I have so much privilege to be that translator and it's not a privilege we take lightly at all. So we want to go in as informed, as well-researched as we can. And I know that as a CEO, you know, if I came and tried to do it myself, I would do a very surface level job.

9:04So that's the team. Well, I feel like it's the same thing with running a company, right? You like build a good group of people that can make something that's beyond what would happen just on your own. Yeah. And it sounds like a really fun and exhausting project to be working on. I don't know if you're too early in the process, But I'm curious if you've had any meals recently that are going to make their way into the cookbook that are especially memorable for you. I mean, we're a month in and we just got back from Kashmir. So I was in Kashmir a week ago and we had two days at our saffron farm partner's house and our Kashmiri chili farm partner's house.

9:38It was fascinating. They live an hour away from each other and they're both indigenous Kashmiri Muslim families. But their cuisines could not be more different from each other. Wow. Which is just so special to understand the nuances. So one of the recipes that just stood out to us so deeply was a pulao. It's a simple vegetable pulao, but it's cooked in mutton stock. And the mutton stock is from a mutton recipe that makes up the curry that you eat the pulao with. So you're using truly every part of the animal. And the curry is called ab ghosh. And it's actually the tail of the mutton. And it's a whole milk-based curry that's really about softening the tail down so that it's really, really like soft and delicious.

10:25Like oxtail kind of? Yeah, exactly. It's essentially goat tail instead of oxtail. But it gets kind of like cartilage-y and shreddy in that way? Yes, exactly. It's like really tender and like really rich in terms of taste. And it's not gamy at all, which I was surprised by. Like I saw the tale and was sort of like, I don't want to. But it was amazing. Yeah, you had to. It's my job. And it's also a respect, right? Yeah. If we're going into people's homes and they're showing us their culture, then it's our job to go in with a super open mind and be like, we will eat as like a blessing, whatever you give us.

10:57And then translate that equitably. An open mind and an empty stomach. Yeah. And how did that compare to the other farming families cuisine that they were cooking? So I would say that the saffron farming family, the Meir family, their food was much gentler. So they cook a lot of things in stock, but it's not overly spiced. They're not adding a lot of different elements. It was very simple food. I think part of that is that they grow saffron for a living. So they're used to taking this like beautiful aromatic ingredient saffron and then really doing the least possible to highlight it. because then just letting it be, right?

11:33Whereas the Kashmiri chili family, they grow chilies. So it's intense, it's punchy. They add lots of spices in there. So it's heavier food. So much fun to eat. We made something called a var masala with the Kashmiri chili farmers, which is essentially like a pre-made spice cake that you hand pound. So if you assume that like a pesto gets sun-dried and turned into a cake, that then you can use through the year to add flavor to your dishes. Oh, cool. It's like a Japanese curry brick also. Exactly. Yeah, that's like a very good comparison. But it uses something called prawn, which is a wild onion in it.

12:11So it has the depth from the Kashmiri chilies and also like a very soft oniony flavor from the prawn. I brought three cakes back with me and I've been using them in absolutely everything. Wow. OK, I want to see a picture of those later. I'll show you. I love that. And I love this idea that like the cooking style and almost like the temperament is related to the kind of ingredient that they're growing. It feels like a like a children's book or a movie kind of, you know, that like beautiful connection into how like the ingredient itself impacts how you're cooking. Yeah. And I think it's like such a testament to terroir and this idea of what like, I think we've talked about farm to table cooking for so many different cuisines, right?

12:50But I really think that for South Asian food, the norm in North America has been Northern Indian heavy paneer, butter masala, chicken, you know, butter chicken, all of that. And I think it feels very exciting to be able to tell real farm to table stories of South Asia. I just feel very lucky to be able to do that. Definitely. And to have the spice be a part of the farm to table conversation and not just an heirloom tomato. Exactly. So I want to talk to you a little bit about how you go about expanding your roster of spices, because I subscribe to the diaspora emails. So I feel like all the time I'm seeing that new products, new things are coming out at this scale at this point.

13:26How does that work? Do you have like a whisper network telling you about new farmers that you should check out? Do you have a list of spices that you want to carry that you don't right now? It's a mix of things. So in the early days, it was a lot of outreach, right? Like I was visiting 20 farms to find the one turmeric farmer that we were going to work with. Now, it is more like a whisper network than it used to be. Like people will write to me, they'll send samples to us because we have 140 farmers in our network. It's a lot. It's a lot. And they all talk to their communities and their friends saying that, hello, we have this great buyer who pays four to six X Thakmari price really cares about quality.

14:04So people will write to us and we'll just keep absorbing samples. At this point, though, like we have 30 spices and I think now we're at 10 masalas like spice blend. Yeah. So we have a full plate and it's more about curating things that we think there's an audience for. So, for example, while we were in Kashmir last week, we started working with prawn, this wild onion shallot hybrid. And immediately there was an understanding that actually offering little like slices of fried prawn could be incredible. And every woman in the valley, in the Kashmiri Valley, grows a little patch of prawn in her kitchen garden.

14:47So this could provide, so if we're able to create like a women's co-op around it, this could provide a little bit of extra income to a bunch of different women in the valley, as long as we can figure out the processing and stuff. And we have amazing processing partners in every region that we work in. So like, that's an idea that I'm now marinating in that, I don't know, I hope will launch in the middle of next year. Sometimes my wild ideas work and sometimes, you know, building a completely new rural supply chain proves too hard. We can't get quality consistently from them. And I have to give up on some of these hopes and dreams.

15:21But Like a good example is we got connected to this farming community up in Uttarakhand, which is essentially in the Himalayas in the northeast of the country. And it's 40 villages. They all grow something called Pahari garlic, which means mountain garlic. It's a super potent garlic that even in dried form, it tastes like garlic bread. Like it's as if you're eating bread and butter and garlic altogether. But they were only producing a couple hundred kilograms at a time. We knew that if we launched it, it would go wild. And so we needed about 2000 kilograms to actually sustain it as a product and to be worth everybody's while.

16:01So we've spent the past two and a half years giving them two different like capital loans to help them build a completely mountainous processing facility seven hours from the nearest town up in the mountains. I think it's like 10 ,000 feet above sea level. Road access is only a couple of months of the year. and it's been madness, but over three years, we've actually pulled it off. And now we are in stock with garlic at least half the year. So with enough sort of grit and gumption, it does happen, but sometimes it's too mad and I have to let it go. My God, I feel like the inside of your brain must be insane.

16:37Like whenever I get overwhelmed with doing too many things, I'll keep that in mind because that's like such an involved process. And I'm glad you mentioned the masalas because I wanted to talk to you about just how your team and you approach developing blends, especially like blends that have so much cultural and personal significance and variation. Do you always have one in mind or how do you go about like, for example, developing the chai masala? Our process is madness, to be honest with you. Just like the other thing. I think as a team, what, you know, we know that it's so hard what we do every day.

17:09And I think what keeps us going is that we know we work super, super hard at it. And so, you know, to backtrack to the masalas, at this point, chai has been around for about three years in our roster. It is our most popular spice by a long shot. When I started developing the chai masala recipe, it started with what is the chai that I love drinking, right? Like it's all recipes are inherently personal. So we lead with the personal weight. We're not trying to be the perfect chai experience for every South Asian person in the world. You know, the way that I drink my chai and my dad drink my chai are completely different.

17:48He thinks my chai is disgusting. I think it's great. So usually, I think rather than give you chai, chai was a very personal example. I'll give you garam masala as an example. So Asha and I came up with a garam masala recipe. She and I have a very close working relationship. And like sometimes are able to just finish each other's sentences as we make iterations of things. I think we made about six iterations. We felt really good about it. And then we gave five or six samples to different elders in our community. So a couple of team members, moms, my auntie. And the feedback that we got was devastating.

18:23Oh, no. They were just like, this is crap. I don't know what you think this is. This is not garam masala. And we were about a month out from launch, which is really cutting it down to the wire for us. Yeah. Was there like a specific element that they took issue with? Or was just the complete package? They told us that it was all like absolute rubbish. Oh, no. There wasn't even, you know, one ingredient is not OK or take one thing down, which is feedback that we can work with. There was a nothing about this works. And you clearly don't know what garam masala is. Not from the aunties also. Exactly.

18:52Back to the drawing board. We really needed auntie approval. So what we did is we used Eat Your Books. I feel like I'm like a walking spokesperson to find every garam masala across our office cookbook collection, which was about 18 recipes. So like Nick Sharma, Meera Sodha, Tejal Rao's one on New York Times, like everywhere. And then we made all of them. And then we made our version. And then we ranked them. And we basically started looking at, okay, we also made a big pot of saag, which is, you know, saag is. And we divvied it up into little Dixie cups. And then tadkad, so we toasted each blend in oinkhi and added it on top of the saag.

19:34So we were tasting it raw and tasting it in cooked form and then used all that taste testing information to create this giant spreadsheet identifying the traits that we liked in each one and then narrow that down to a blend that then took another four trials to get to the ultimate blend. So that's our process. Did it get anti-approval? It got full anti-approval. My cook at home, who is a scathing critic of most things I do, loves it. Good. Yeah, I think that's what we want to get to is we know that it is, by our standards, the most delicious thing on the market. It may not be, you know, everybody's version of something, but it's and that's why we call it the house blend.

20:12It's our house blend. Your recipe might be different. Great. Take our blend and add something to it and make it your own. Yeah, I think that's a really good approach. And I like hearing about how you are testing the masala like also cooked because like obviously these are blends that are meant for cooking, although it should be like delicious on its own. So are you working on more masalas or you have your lineup and that's kind of where it's at? So last year we released the like core masala renaissance connection, which was chai masala, haldi dood, garam masala, tandoori masala, biryani masala and chaat masala.

20:46That for me felt like the core six we wanted to start with. This year we've released what we're like sort of tongue in cheek calling the Amriki collection. So it's a very like diaspora, nostalgia, Indian American take on American classics. So we started with Pumpkin Spice, which you have in your hand. I'm looking at it right now. It looks so great. OK, so pumpkin spice you started with? Started with pumpkin spice. Then we just launched a steak masala and a taco masala. And they're just fun. Yeah. Like I think for me, they're not rooted in a deep authenticity. They're fun. They're how like it's the Indian-American cooking that I grew up with, that Asha grew up with.

21:28The steak masala was just taking our amazing raw spices and, you know, single ingredients and saying, we actually have the best Montreal steak seasoning. Let's make it. Then we just launched a hot cocoa, which actually rolls out in Whole Foods across Northern California next week. And the final one, which we're actually waiting for it to arrive from India, so it hasn't launched yet. Here's the big spoiler is popcorn masala. Oh, my God. So fun. And didn't you do like a collab with, was it Jacobson's Salt? I should probably throw it out because it must be old by now. But I think I still have a jar of It's like a nutritional yeast, turmeric, pumpkin.

22:05And it's so yummy. It's turmeric, nutritional yeast, and salt. Yeah, I think I just said pumpkin when I meant to say popcorn. Yeah, it's just those three ingredients. This one is like, it has garlic in it. It has chili in it. It has chaat masala in it. So it's a little bit more complex. They're both super delicious. I think one is if you just want like straight on cheesy flavor. And this one is heat, umami, cheesy, all in one. Yeah. So to rewind to Pumpkin Spice for a second, what were your thoughts on Pumpkin Spice prior to releasing a Pumpkin Spice? I think we had complex feelings as a team.

22:42And, you know, we've talked about it before because I didn't I moved to America 12 years ago. I didn't have a lot of the like cultural context of the history of Pumpkin Spice in like the nostalgia to see it. Yeah. Yeah. Or even just the understanding of how it fits in with the rise of Starbucks or like how it fits in versus into white culture. Like there was a lot there. The memes. Yeah, all the memes. Like I think like the Christian girl autumn memes went all the way over my head. I didn't understand anything. Yeah. But Asha made me my first BSL a year and a half ago. And she made basically a syrup with actual pumpkin and a spice blend that she'd come up with and maple syrup.

23:24So that was a syrup. And then she had a shot of coffee and then milk foam on top. That sounds so good. It was the most delicious thing I had ever drunk. So for us, we know that we have the most delicious nutmeg on earth. Like our mace is like a floral, fruity revelation. Our white pepper is so sort of sharp and lemongrassy. We have all the raw materials. Let's just do it and have fun with it, not take it so seriously. And as of, I think, the past three months, our pumpkin spice has eclipsed our chai masala on the website. Oh, my God. Which is saying a lot, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it's because our chai masala numbers are sort of out of control.

24:03And I think people before a lot of times I would get this response from people when I would tell them that I run a spice company that sources from South Asia. They would be like, oh, well, I don't really cook Indian food. I would look at them being like, do you use black pepper? Yeah. And I think there's a feeling of we sourced all these single ingredients. And while we are rooted in South Asia, you can use these spices for any cuisine. And so the Amriki collection for us became a way of saying, use it in anything, you know, use it to play. You're not boxed into South Asian cuisine. You should know where it comes from.

24:35But that's just the starting point. Yeah. You know, I wrote a piece for Taste earlier in the year about spice blends specifically that I talked to Asha as a part of. And I talked to Marwan, who does Spicewala. And he was telling me that all of their top performing spice blends are non-cultural spice blends. that would be or maybe what I would say American cultural American cultural or like a like a steak spice blend you know or something like that that he was saying that also maybe there's this idea of like accessibility in some kind of way that people are like I don't cook that kind of food but to me I think it's almost the reverse which is like maybe the pumpkin spice is your way in to diaspora if you haven't previously and then you try it and you're like wow these spices are so delicious and I actually do cook with these.