Redesigning the Spice Trade: Talking Turmeric and Tariffs with Diaspora Co.’s Sana Javeri Kadri

Sana Javeri Kadri is the founder of Diaspora Co., a single origin spice company that is revolutionizing the 500 year old $5 billion spice industry. Their mission is to “put money, equity and power into the best regenerative spice farms across South Asia, and bring wildly delicious, hella potent flavors into your home cooking.” In just 8 years, Diaspora Co. has put money, equity and power into 140 farms into countries across India and Sri Lanka.

In this episode, Sana tells host Ellen McGirt the story of how taking a trip to India to study turmeric led to her starting a global import-export business at 23 years old. She also explains why Diaspora Co pays the farmers they work with  4x the commodity price on average and how Diaspora’s packaging is shaking up the spice aisle:

“So one of the things that colonialism did to the spice trade is it commodified it, “ Javeri Kadri says. “The price of spices is set based on global demand and supply, right? So a farmer might say, actually given my labor bill, my water bill and like what I need to earn, I need to be charging a dollar per kilogram, but the market price is only 50 cents per kilogram. He’s just taking a loss, right? So we are actually decoupling it from the commodity system and saying, you don’t need to look at that. You tell me what you need to grow something truly beautiful and truly the highest quality commercially available, and we will work our business model upwards from there to and fit you what is needed. And that means we’re paying about 4x, but sometimes it’s 10x, you know, what the commodity price is, and sometimes it is 2x.”

And she gets brutally honest about bootstrapping a business and navigating tariffs.  

On this season of DB|BD, we are Designing for the Unknown. Host Ellen McGirt asks visionary designers how they navigate uncertainty- whether it be technological disruption, global crises, or shifting cultural norms.

Learn more about Diaspora Co. and follow Sana on Instagram.

Ryan Coogler’s 2022 BAFTA David Lean lecture

If you liked this episode, be sure to revisit DB|BD Episode 1202 A Mastercard for Pigs? How Digital Infrastructure is Transforming Farming and Fighting Poverty with Tara Nathan

Follow The Design of Business | The Business of Design on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. 

Transcript

Ellen McGirt So I wanna say it was about 2016, 2017, and my then teenage stepdaughter, Rachel and I, got into DIY skincare. Not for the Instagram, although I’m sure there is a photo of us way back in my stream with our faces covered with orange goo, but mostly for the fun of doing girl stuff together. Being a thrifty person, my first investment in this lifestyle was a tub the size of my head of turmeric. Because you have to throw a whole lot of turmeric in a homemade mask of yogurt and honey or whatever, and you get what? Glowy, happy skin. That was the plan. Turmeric, which you probably already know, is a deep golden orange spice, a relative of ginger, native to parts of India and Southeast Asia. In addition to being delish, offers an almost staggering array of potential health benefits and may be good for everything from staving off joint pain and inflammation, menstrual pain, maybe even depression, dementia, and some cancers. Research, of course, is ongoing. While our skincare regimen did not last, Rachel and I unwittingly became part of a trend. Turmeric mania was about to take root. According to the American Botanical Council, just one of many industry watchers, sales of turmeric supplements in 2016 grew 85.5% year over year. And as we’ll learn, that demand for turmeric for all its applications continued. For food and beverages, supplements, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, all of it. And today, the global market for the orange stuff was 4.4 billion in 2023. Now, around the same time I bought this vat of turmeric, my conversation partner today, Sana Javeri Kadri, started asking questions. She was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and had just finished college in the US and was working her first job when she noticed that people like me were buying turmeric in droves. Where did it come from in the world? Who was importing it? And why was it almost always this dry, stale, not delicious powder? It led her on a journey literally to discover how turmeric was sourced, the farmers who cultivated it, and the ancient spice trade that has never treated them well. Sana is the founder of Diaspora Co. A unique direct trade spice company that she says is working towards a radically equitable, sustainable and more delicious spice supply chain. The former art student never set out to start a global business and yet the great ones never do. I’m Ellen McGirt and this is the Design of Business|Business Of Design. This season, we’re designing for the unknown. And in this episode, we are keeping things spicy. Sana, how are you? 

Sana Javeri Kadri Hi, that was such a great intro, wow. 

Ellen McGirt How did it hit your ear to meet somebody who was on the other side of the trend? My heart was in the right place, but I was buying a bunch of powder. 

Sana Javeri Kadri I was gonna say that the powder you were buying probably wasn’t doing what you wanted it to do, but I’m glad it made you glow. 

Ellen McGirt I think it was just hanging out with my beloved Rachel that made me glow. But I wanna dig into all of it, but let’s go back to 2017 where I started my story. Turmeric lattes are popping off in the US. And you’re 23, you’ve got a job, and you buy a one-way ticket back to Mumbai with two grand in your pocket to figure out what was going on. 

Sana Javeri Kadri Yeah. So I was walking every day, I was living in San Francisco and I would walk from the BART station to my job and I’d see all these turmeric lattes on cafe menus and, like you said, I was like, where did it come from and why are people drinking this stuff? And when I bought that one-way ticket I was really thinking, okay, I’ll write some nice emails and then I’ll find some really photogenic, wonderful turmeric farmers, I’ll take some photos of them, I will figure out the supply chain. And then maybe I’ll post those photos somewhere. It could be an article. That’s as far as I went in my thinking. But then once I got home to India and I tried to find farmers, problem number one, it was very hard to connect with farmers. I was sending WhatsApp messages in like different agricultural groups. I was writing to food scientists. I was just trying to make connections and I was having a very hard time. So that was problem number 1. Problem number two was when I would eventually make my way to, you know, a random farm following a hair of a lead. I would find that these farmers were growing industrially, which meant that they were just like monocropping. So it was like acres and acres of turmeric. It was seed that was basically not very good varieties of seed. So I like to make the comparison of like, you know like a Walmart winter tomato, like dead of winter. You buy a tomato and it’s like mealy and it really has no flavor. It’s kind of sour. 

Ellen McGirt Yes! 

Sana Javeri Kadri Like they were growing the Walmart winter tomato of turmeric, and that was the norm. And I was like, why? Like where are the beautiful, juicy summer heirloom tomatoes of turmeric? And, um, I was finding that unfortunately that knowledge of, you know, how to seed save and how to grow varieties that are grown for flavor and aroma, that knowledge has actually been lost. So that led me down this huge expedition of why was that knowledge lost? 

Ellen McGirt Wow. Why? 

Sana Javeri Kadri Colonialism! And really it was that the British, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the French all came to different parts of South and Southeast Asia over the past 500 years. And they were like, ooh, turmeric, ooh pepper, we want that. And in wanting it and demanding it, they didn’t understand the ingredient, but they felt that. If we sell that back home, it’ll be really expensive and we’ll make a lot of money. So it became this trade that was rooted in export and in profit, but not in making something the most delicious version of itself. There are actually hundreds of varieties of turmeric across South Asia that are used for different things. So there’s actually a turmeric that smells similar to jasmine and sandalwood, and that’s used specifically for medicinal or religious ceremonies because of the aroma. And so you grow it to use for its aroma. There are varieties that have a 9% curcmin content, which is the anti-inflammatory good stuff, that you grow specifically for health issues. So if your bones are aching, you grow that variety. And then there are varieties that grow really well when you intercrop them with marigolds, the flower, or with oranges or citrus, the fruit. And then they get this really bright lemony aroma that is just fun to cook with. So, you know, for your face, for you to get all those antioxidants on your skin, I would have wanted the high curcmin variety, but you as a customer, a continent away are not being given that knowledge of which variety is actually best for your skin. So the more I was learning about this, the more was like, okay, well, who is growing these heirloom varieties and who’s preserving these techniques? And then are they growing in a way that is regenerative? So are they growing in a way that three generations from now, the soil will be just as healthy as it is today. Are they growing in a way that the plants are getting more and more resilient with time? Or are the plants getting weaker and weaker because we’re adding more and more pesticides and fertilizers and actually weakening the health of the plant? Through that process, I was able to meet this incredible farmer, Mr. Prabhu Kasarineni. I was 23 at the time. I think he was only five or six years older than me. He was a third-generation farmer. His family actually used to grow tobacco for two generations. And he, and very industrially, you know, the Green Revolution was when American industrial agriculture came to India and basically told people like, if you grow using fertilizer, pesticide and machines, life will be good. And that misled them because by the time Prabhu had grown up, his family wasn’t able to make a good living. They weren’t making a profit. And he, I think, just had this feeling of like, I think it can be done differently. And he self-taught himself using WhatsApp and YouTube. He self-tought himself organic farming and then found this beautiful heirloom variety called Pragati Turmeric. And now, if you know anything about diaspora, you know Pragati Turmeric is kind of our pride and joy and started growing it. And when I went to visit him July 2017, it was so hot that summer. Um, I smelt it and I was like, I think this is the best thing I’ve ever seen. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered turmeric like this. 

Ellen McGirt Yeah, so we’re shaking our fist at capitalism while you’re growing a business. There’s some tension there that you’re gonna be stepping into as you grow. But in the very beginning, here you are, this novice with curiosity and a big, juicy family with a love for food and a love of tradition, like you sort of came to this curiosity naturally. Once you found one person who could show you a better way, what did you do then? 

Sana Javeri Kadri I bought all this turmeric with my tax refund. I bought 350 kilograms of turmeric, cleared out my, I think, two to 3K tax refund, and then took a loan from my parents of 8K, which in rupees is a lot, and was like, I’m going to figure out how to export this turmeric and then import it into America. I had no idea what I was doing. And then I will figure out to store that 350 kilograms, which is 700 pounds. In my queer co-op in Oakland’s basement. So I was living in a cooperative house with 10 other people, only two bathrooms, and we had a pretty nasty basement. And I was like, yeah, I’ll just star all the turmeric there. And the thought was that, you know, I knew a lot of chefs and a lot of food industry people in the Bay Area. So I’m like, I’ll basically hand sell it to them. I’ll go up to people and I’ll explain to them why it’s better. And we sold out of that first lot of 350 kilograms in four days. Which was just, I mean, I didn’t see it coming. You know, like that was when I, it’s that moment where I think my ambition was this small and the ambition kind of grew without me even trying. I was like, oh, I guess we got to get more. And that was farmer number one. And then fast forward almost eight years where now we now work with 140 regenerative farmers across every corner of India and Sri Lanka. From all the way on the Myanmar-Indian border in Manipur all the way north on the India-China border in Kashmir all the way south in the hill country of Sri Lanka. So we really do expand the length and breadth of South Asia and we bring in about 35 spices.

Ellen McGirt That’s incredible. I know, I think I know that you don’t have contracts with these individual farmers. Is that still true? 

Sana Javeri Kadri That is still true. It’s all relationship-based, but what I do still have is that I still visit every single farm we work with, and my team tries to visit all of our farms once a year. So you know, we know their names, we know their family’s names, we’re involved in their lives, I try to go to their weddings. We’re building a community and I think we’ve realized that that goes much deeper than a contract ever will. 

Ellen McGirt So speaking of community, how do you think about their collective power? Are you thinking about them as a sort of a quasi unformed union with a voice? How are they advocating for some of the bigger issues in their lives?

Sana Javeri Kadri  I would say that each farmer or each community that we work with are so different from each other. So there are shared learnings. But for example, we work with a cooperative of garlic farmers up in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand. So it’s called Pahadi pink garlic, which means mountainous pink garlic. And it’s 40 villages of people who each come together with like, you know, maybe there’s three garlic plants and they collect them for us to grind and mill into a powder. The problems that they face are mostly logistical because they live nine hours away from the nearest town way up in the mountains. And the road is only accessible half the year because it snowed in the other half of the year. So their issues are really around living in connection with nature and living in disconnection from society, right? So how do you do business amidst that setting? Whereas our turmeric farmer in Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Prabhu, I think his issue is primarily that climate change is affecting the eastern coast of India stronger and more intensely than almost any other part. So he is seeing flash floods, he’s seeing sudden onslaughts of rain. So how does he deal with, you know, he just planted all of his turmeric for the season, suddenly his entire field is flooded and he’s lost his entire crop, what does he do then? So then what we’re able to do is, okay. He’s creating a community in his area so that if he loses his crop, he can still buy some seeds again from a friend of his who’s also growing that variety. We’ve helped him have a mill-on farm so that then even if he’s not growing it necessarily, he can mill his friend’s product for him. So his issue is really in the face of climate change, how do you create community? And I think our job is, how do we listen to all of these extremely varied voices and problems and use our business model and our time and attention and skills to advocate for these people? But I think that the heart of our model is that we pay our farm partners on average 4X the commodity price. So one of the things that colonialism did to the spice trade is it commodified the spice trade. So it means that the price of spices, like the price, of turmeric is set based on global demand and supply, right? So a farmer might say, actually, given my labor bill, my water bill, and like what I need to earn, I need to be charging a dollar per kilogram. But the market price is only 50 cents per kilogram, he’s just taking a loss, right. So we are actually decoupling it from the commodity system and saying, you don’t need to look at that. You tell me what you need to grow something truly beautiful. Um, and like truly the highest quality commercially available and we will work our business model upwards from there to compensate you what is needed. And that means we’re paying about 4X, but sometimes it’s 10 X, um, you know, what the commodity price is. And sometimes it’s 2x. 

Ellen McGirt So how have you learned, you have learned so much in such a short period of time. Eight years must feel like a lifetime to you, but it really is just goes by in a flash. 

Sana Javeri Kadri A few lifetimes.

Ellen McGirt So how you learned to differentiate this product in say the American marketplace or the UK marketplace where we’re sort of sensitive to commodity prices, like we’re used to that. 

Sana Javeri Kadri We look to, one, external examples, right? So a great example is coffee, right. So up until maybe 15 years ago, all we knew was our Folger’s tin, whereas now everybody knows about their Blue Bottle and their pour-over and their cold foam. So we’re doing the exact same thing where we’re saying there is your commodity turmeric. It’s turmeric that’s mixed up from all over the world and it’s mysterious yellow powder and you can buy it really cheap on Amazon. We’re not giving you that. We’re giving you, this is where it comes from, this is how it’s harvested, this is the variety, and it’s much more flavorful and much more strong. So even though it’s more expensive, you actually need to use less of it. And in doing that education of words like, “same-year harvest”, “single origin”, “regeneratively grown”, where you’re educating consumers on why the price point is different, right? And it does mean that like, McDonald’s is likely not buying turmeric for me. And that’s okay, but whilst we are trying to make our products as accessible as possible. We also recognize that for now we are a more expensive product.

Ellen McGirt So that means you spend a lot of time in the consumer marketplace, having these conversations and building on the momentum of other commodities that differentiate itself around taste and quality and also lifestyle, right? It feels, you know, it feels like, it feels special to make a meal with this. It feels better. You learn to make homemade turmeric latte. It should be better than you can get at the local. 

Sana Javeri Kadri Absolutely. 

Ellen McGirt So another thing that sets you apart is your packaging. I wanna talk a little bit about that because it seems that it’s fun, it’s floral, it just looks different than everything else that’s on the market, which has got to be hard because you also want to be able to preserve the quality of the spices that’s wending its way across the planet. How do you address that? 

Sana Javeri Kadri Yeah. So actually, all the packaging in the grocery store today is optimizing for aesthetics and not for quality. So spices that get oxidized, which means when they’re exposed to the air or sunlight, they degrade. And when you look in the store, you see these long jars that are glass where you can see the spice inside. That’s great for the grocery stores so you can easily pick your spices, but it is not great for that spice. Because it’s actually degrading just by sitting on the shelf. So for us, it was a very conscious decision that we will not offer things in a clear container. It’ll be something that is first and foremost, protecting the quality of the spice inside, which is why we went with the tin. I also wanted to make sure we were centering the origin of these ingredients in our packaging aesthetic. And for me, how do I make something look South Asian, without being overly nostalgic, without being rooted in stereotypes, without slapping an elephant or a mango or paisley on there, which are such, I find, orientalist tropes of India. So how do we do it? And for me, it was color. My whole experience of growing up in India was about color. So we went bright. And then the other piece is, if you look at our packaging, we have an illustration of the plant on every single package because we constantly want to remind people. That actually this is not a mysterious powder, this is a plant that grows in the earth that was harvested at peak season and processed to find its way to you, but it came from a plant. This is what that plant looks like. 

Ellen McGirt I love it. I want to talk about money for a second, since we’re redesigning business. 

Sana Javeri Kadri Yea, money.

Ellen McGirt Right? You are not a prime candidate for big VC money and scaling in five years and like a big exit. 

Sana Javeri Kadri No m’am.

Ellen McGirt And you knew that going in, but you do need partners and you do need money. How did you think about it and how do you make those decisions and how you make those partnerships work? 

Sana Javeri Kadri Thank you. This is such a good question. And I feel like especially for women of color, young women of color, this can be a trap, honestly. So first five years, we bootstrapped. Why? I think because I had to prove the basics of the concept. I wasn’t even sure the business model was viable. And so there was a lot of trial and error and a lot like, can we make the math math? And after five years there was, oh, okay, the math is mathing, but we actually need: One, economies of scale, and two, working capital. So in order for me to go from doing a million dollars in revenue to doing three million dollars in revenues, I have to buy three million dollars worth of product, right? But I don’t got it like that. And so that’s where we started taking, we found a line of credit from a really values aligned social impact lender who understood what we were trying to do and was like, I feel like gave us like a training wheels loan, they’re called RSF, they’re wonderful. And now we’ve worked our way up to a very significant line with them, but it took three years to get to that point. So step one was, okay, let’s get working capital so that we can pay our farm partners advances on harvest and scale year on year. But then next up was, Okay, but I also need to make investments in team, like I need to have a real team and I can’t afford that this year. But I need to invest in it this year for next year. If I want to get into Whole Foods or I want get into Target, I need the sales team that can get me in there. I can’t do that alone. So that’s when I went out looking for capital, but I knew that I wanted, what I keep saying is values align slow money. And what does that mean, right? It’s money that they’re investing in me saying, you’re doing good in the world. We want to put our money somewhere good. You can have a 10 year horizon, a 15 year horizon in terms of an exit or a dividend. And pretty much as long as you make me more than inflation, I’m good. You know, like they’re not in it to like, absolutely turn a profit. They’re in it because they want to take their vast sums of money and see it do good. So, currently, we have almost 60 angel investors who are really like community members and individuals that I respect and admire because I mean I moved to America at 18 knowing like my one auntie here so I really had to build community from the ground up and so when I was looking for investment like I didn’t know like the random venture capitalists to reach out to, which I’m glad I didn’t. I knew you know my restauranteur friend. I knew my friend Ben Jacobson who runs like the coolest salt company I know. I know Tyler Malek runs Salt & Straw ice cream. And so those are the folks I reached out to, and I was very lucky, and they were like, we love what you’re doing, we believe in it, and we think you’re an amazing partner to our business. That was one, and then the other was a family office. And in this case, it’s a family office called Pentland, and they’re actually the family that owns Speedo. So they have all their big businesses, they do a lot else in the world, but they have this fund that specifically they’re like, we wanna do good in the world fund. And they gave it to us. And we’ve used that capital to really grow our team. We’re now about 25 people between India, America, and the UK, and really grow our revenue. And we’re on track this year, tariffs willing, to be profitable. 

Ellen McGirt That’s wonderful. Tariffs willing. I do have to follow up on that. How have you navigated that? I mean, how are you planning for that? 

Sana Javeri Kadri Yeah, I mean, we’re currently in the middle of a 90-day pause, right, and the pause is a very unique word because we’re still being charged 10% tariffs, which already for last month was over $10,000, and I think this month will be probably another $15K, which is really not cheap. That’s more than my salary. So it hurts. And I think there’s this feeling that these tariffs somehow hurt other countries. And what is not being realized is anybody that’s an importer into America, it’s a tariff directly on our business because we can’t ask a turmeric farmer in India to front a 10% tariff. So we’re fronting that cost, which is debilitating. And I think we’re really hoping that at the end of 90 days, it gets knocked back down to what it used to be, which was one and half percent. But if not, if it goes back to what it was proposed at, which was 26% for India and 44% for Sri Lanka, we won’t make a profit this year. It’s very simple, we’ll make a loss. And we’re very lucky in that we had cash reserves from last year that we can rely on to keep going. But we’re seeing fellow small businesses that source equitably and have like, idealistic, amazing founders close around us every day because it’s just too tough right now. 

Ellen McGirt So a couple of things to sort of dig into the impact that you’re having after all this time and relationship and community and just this wonderful group of growers and purveyors that you are working with. Do you, have you developed a set of metrics that help make the case that farming this way makes a difference? 

Sana Javeri Kadri Oh, good question. In our 2022 impact report, we studied, one, what does regenerative agriculture mean? Because people throw around that word a lot, and it’s become such a buzzword. So what does it actually mean to each individual farmer? And then two, does biodiversity, A, make the product more delicious, B, increase the longevity of the health of the farm. And three, help the farmer profit more. And so, and it was a 35 page report and the answer was yes to all three. And it was very rigorous, you know, we hired external consultants, we did blind taste tests. We tried to do it with as much of a scientific approach as possible. To date, we’ve been able to pay about two and a half million dollars directly to our 140 farm partners. So on average, the Indian farmer across the country earns about $2,600 per year. That is very little money. On average, we are able to pay our farm partner $26,000 per year, so 10X. And that is not including the other crops that they grow that they also sell to the local market. So usually our farm partners are earning 30 to 35K per year which is transformative. With 140 farmers that we have we’ve never had a farm partner leave us. Um, actually we had one, but, um, he was a Hindu supremacist and I’m Muslim. So, you know, that was a mutually complex situation. 

Ellen McGirt I was going to ask about that. I understand. 

Sana Javeri Kadri He didn’t want to play with us either. 

Ellen McGirt Understood, understood, sort of. I sort of understand that. But I accept that he had to go. I accept he had go. God, that’s awful. 

Sana Javeri Kadri But other than that, they’ll never leave, because we always pay on time, we always really well, and we care. We show up when it matters. 

Ellen McGirt So if you were going to create a consulting arm, I know you’re not, but if you were, or if you are going to be asked to provide testimony to a functional government of some kind, you can pick whatever one you like, how would you advise other people, whether they’re in the agriculture space or trade space, to begin to rethink their businesses in this regenerative, sustainable, equitable way? 

Sana Javeri Kadri Yeah, all the juicy questions. I feel like the first one is something that my 23-year-old self really did right and I just didn’t know any better. It was that we built it the most equitable way from the beginning, right? I think when you try, when you build a business and then you’re like, oh wait, this is not so equitable, let me try to fix it when you’re trying to go back and fix. Um It doesn’t work as well because you’ve gotten used to a certain profit margin. You’ve gotten use to doing business in a certain way. So fixing things tends to be much tougher than just building it correctly from the ground up. That’s always my advice to young business people who ask me questions is, don’t say you’re like, oh, once we get to this revenue, I’ll source better. Just source better, you know? That’s number one. And then I think number two is believing that customers know better. Like, I think often in conventional business, we say, eh, the customer doesn’t care anyway. Like, they just want something. They want it cheap. They just want rubbish. Like, no, they won’t know. And I think we really try to treat our customers like we want to be treated, which is like intelligent, knowing beings who want to take care of ourselves. And that, like, belief has paid off again and again. So that’s how I would speak about it from a business point of view. From a government point of view, oh gosh, I have many feelings. We have to support farmers better, you know, currently we are providing 30% pre-harvest financing, 30% as soon as harvest is done financing, and then 40% when it arrives to us. But that means I’ve paid 60% for a product, usually three months before I ever received it. Um, so I’m basically the like 0% interest lender to 140 farmers because the state is not supporting its regenerative farmers. For me, that needs to change. That’s really where I would like government globally to step in and support farmers if they want to see farmers actually mitigate climate change, which is possible with regenerative farming. I went to climate week in New York last year and it was my first time. And honestly, it was one of the most disillusioning things. Where it was like these big rooms with speakers getting paid crazy amounts of money. Like we were all just sitting in our air conditioned board rooms using big words. I was like, if we just spent, I don’t know, a 10th of our budget of this conference on actually just handing cash to regenerative farmers, we would do a lot more to like mitigate climate change than we’re doing right now. 

Ellen McGirt Cash is an amazing tool and solution. 

Sana Javeri Kadri It is. 

Ellen McGirt Cash works. I’ve studied it in a variety of places over a variety formats over the years and cash just works. But you know who else works? Customers. And you are unusual. You’ve built an unusual relationship with your actual end user customers, people who are buying off the shelves. You’ve got a Discord. Channel, a Discord server, which I think is just so fun and you’ve published a cookbook and you share recipes. Tell us about the effort to build that community and who is your, who are you trying to appeal to there? 

Sana Javeri Kadri When I started the business, I was a 23-year-old self-described baby gay, which is that I had just come out of the closet, I felt very lonely in the world, I wasn’t having an easy time with my family, my Bay Area community was very much my chosen family, and I was working in restaurants and just feeling pretty alone. So when I started a business, it was like a call for community and saying, I’m going do this work, will you hold me? And can we create space together in me doing this work? And so that’s always been the approach is this is a community of care and I’ll take care of you guys and I give you guys amazing ingredients and you take care me and we’ll take of our farmers and our farmers will take care of you by growing the most beautiful product. Like it really is like quite touchy feely and caring in like truly the corniest way. I can’t even like sugar coat it. And I think that our community has really responded to that. You know, where the whole point of our cookbook is that it’s our farm partners’ heirloom recipes of how they’ve been cooking with these spices for generations, trying to right that colonial wrong, right, so trying to say, okay, you know that black pepper comes from Kerala, but you only know Italian recipes for black pepper. Let me show you our pepper farmers’ black pepper recipes, right? And our community is like, yes, we want that. And I think that the things that I stand by in terms of building that community is really accountability and transparency. So because I started this when I was very young, um, I made a lot of mistakes along the way, um and there were times when I messed up, you know, I collaborated with somebody that maybe I shouldn’t have. I didn’t communicate something correctly. There was a delay that really affected our customers. I think I have learned to be really transparent about what happened and why, and share that via newsletter or Instagram, and apologize, and be like, you know, I know that y’all hold us to a really high standard, and we let you down here, so here’s how we’ll make it better. And every single time, that just like brings in more love and more acceptance and more like vulnerability with our community. So even as we’ve scaled, I would say we’re now like a small business, but we’re like a big small business. And we’re in grocery stores across the U.S., we’re about 600 stores, even people who see us on shelf have heard of that community and say, oh yeah, we know that business. That’s the business that, you know, when the tariffs went live, they promised like never increase prices on us or, you now, I know that that business like really advocated for keeping the name of this chili exactly what the tribal community that grows it wants it to be, even though it’s harder to market. Like those stories start to supersede, our name even, like our reputation starts to supersede us. And that’s so meaningful to me. 

Ellen McGirt You are so thoughtful about some of the big systemic issues that we’re facing, the farmers and by extension, the food and the experiences that we are having very, very far away. And you are unusually dedicated as a founder to talking about these issues and saying things like reparations and colonialism and drawing these, connecting these really dangerous dots. You also seem to have an unusual facility for joyfulness. We are certainly in the US and in lots of parts of Europe having really tough conversations about diversity and equity and all of these things. And we feel like we may have lost quite a bit of ground. We certainly lost quite bit of energy and maybe our allies who we thought they were. So I’m curious what advice you could give our audience. And our leaders out there, people who have maybe inherited a way of working that is going to be harder to rejigger and redesign for good, but still want to do the work about how to maintain the joyful part of things because it really seems to be natural to you, or it seems that you have cultivated to the point where it appears effortless. 

Sana Javeri Kadri I was gonna say antidepressants. 

Ellen McGirt Understood. 

Sana Javeri Kadri But no, seriously, I think for me, you know, when I was in kindergarten, it was like my kindergarten graduation and my family couldn’t find me anywhere. And it was because I was in the kitchen eating everybody’s snacks. And in my report card that year, they said, Sana is a joyful child who goes from room to room looking for food. So I have always been this person whose primary motivation in life is food. And I think, you know, I, but I was also always a deeply feeling person who was affected and hurt by the wrongs of the world. And I, I think part of that is being a queer kid who I think didn’t have the language for that at an early age and was like, why does the world feel hard and against me? And then as I got language, I was like oh, this makes sense now. Um, but so one, I always knew what my joy was, and two, I was always hyper aware of what felt hard about the world. And I think the like, maybe the magic of my job is that I get to navigate what’s hard about the word, but through the lens of the thing that gives me the most joy, you know? And I, I think that when I, when I’m giving career advice, usually to like fellow brown women, it’s saying try to weave those things together because like, we live in a world that is so difficult and complex and unjust, and we have to hold on to our joy. So how can we engage with the work using our joy? And if for somebody that is operating, great, become a surgeon while also trying to hold the door wide open for all the queer, black, brown surgeons to come in behind you. And if it’s spices , do it the way I did.

Ellen McGirt Do it the way you did. And it sounds like for anybody who’s a majority culture powerful person, however it’s defined where you are, noticing the joy of other people and opening the door and enjoying their joy. I think that’s, would you say that’s a piece of it too? Like their joy is important. It’s an important part of the work that they’re doing. 

Sana Javeri Kadri And I think seeing them fully. I have one snarky instance where I gave a keynote last week and the guy asked me, you know, what would you tell to your younger self? And I like without a pause said, I wish my younger self had been more ambitious. And he said, more ambitious than you are, really? And he was so shocked and I felt made smaller in that moment where I was like, am I too ambitious? Is it bad? And he would never have asked a man that. He would have never asked a white woman that. But because I was the first vaguely ambitious brown woman he had met, he couldn’t imagine that there could be more. And all I wanted in that situation was to be fully seen in my truth of wishing that my 23-year-old self could have wanted more. 

Ellen McGirt I love it. Sana, thank you so much for being here with us. 

Sana Javeri Kadri Thanks for having me, this was amazing. 

Ellen McGirt This season, we are ending every episode with a new segment we’re calling The Business of Design. It will feature either a short interview with or a story about a designer or creative who exemplifies design’s power to shape the world for good. This week, we absolutely have to talk about Sinners. Am I right? 

Sinners Trailer You twins? Nah, we cousins. There are legends of people with the gift of making music so true, it can conjure spirits from the past and the future. This gift can bring fame and fortune. Well, somebody take me in your arms. But it also can pierce the veil between life and death. Listen here, this ain’t no house party. 

Ellen McGirt Sinners is director Ryan Coogler’s Southern Gothic horror film, which is at once a tribute to the Coogler family’s Mississippi Delta roots and to blues music and to so much more. The movie is an international sensation. Sinners has grossed $236 million worldwide since it opened on April 18th, making it the highest grossing R-rated horror film in the past decade. Well, every aspect of the film is spectacular. Clearly the magic is Coogler He’s a visionary director and the voice of a generation. He made his first film, Fruitvale Station at 25 and Black Panther and Creed before he turned 30. Sinners is his first truly original story and we at Design Observer cannot wait to see what he does next. So we are leaving you today with some words from Coogler himself. Here is an excerpt from his 2022 BAFTA David Lean Lecture. It’s guaranteed to inspire creatives of all stripes at any point in their career. Enjoy. 

Ryan Coogler But if I hadn’t gotten started when I did, and graduated film school at 24, and made Fruitvale at 25 and, made Creed and Black Panther, around the time of being 30. All these things were like dominoes for me. And if I hadn’t gotten that start. I never would have met Chad, whose time was so limited, and had such a profound effect on my life. I’ll leave y’all with this. All the aspiring filmmakers, actors, journalists, critics, all y’all that aspire to communicate with film language through your work, through your art. No time like the present. Get going. Make that movie, hit that audition, criticize. Criticize whatever you like to criticize. Break it down for the folks who need the break down. Go! Go go go! Don’t wait. Do. Go stand in a place where you feel uncomfortable until you’re there long enough that it is. Thank you.

Ellen McGirt The Design of Business, the Business of Design, is a podcast from Design Observer. Design Observer was co-founded by Jessica Helfand. Our show is written and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme music is by Warner Meadows. Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada mixed and mastered this episode. Thanks always to Sheena Medina, Sarah Gephardt, Rachel Paese, and the entire Design Observer team. And for more long-form content about the people redesigning our world, Please consider subscribing to our newsletters, The Design of Business and the Observatory at designobserver.com.