Diaspora Spice Co.: Spices, Farmers and a New Cookbook

Some brands set out to sell a product. Diaspora Spice Co. set out to change a supply chain, honor a culture, and bring the most potent, story-rich spices in the world into home kitchens across America. Nine years in, they are doing all three.Sana Javeri Kadri is the CEO and founder of Diaspora Spice Co., a regenerative spice company built on a singular mission: put money, equity, and power into the best spice farms across South Asia and bring wildly delicious, hella potent flavors to your everyday cooking. Asha Loupy is Diaspora Spice Co.'s recipe editor and co-author, the woman behind some of the brand's most beloved and obsessively cooked recipes, including the strawberry cardamom bars that reliably spike website traffic every spring.In this episode, host Sarah Perkins sits down with both Sana and Asha for a conversation that covers the full arc: from a 23-year-old Sana buying a 350-kilogram turmeric harvest with her first ever tax refund and storing it in a co-op basement in Oakland, to selling out in four days and waking up to 700 orders after a New York Magazine gift guide mention, to building a company that now works with 100+ regenerative farm partners across South Asia and pays 3.9x above commodity price. And now, a cookbook that took five years, three months of travel across 10 Indian states and Sri Lanka, 14 languages, and one very memorable pumpkin chutney discovered in a kitchen in Kashmir as the cameras were packing up.Asha's origin story is equally delightful: she cold-walked her resume into Market Hall Foods after college, worked her way to the cheese department because that's where all the cool people were, and eventually slid into Sana's DMs with a photo of perfectly pleated cumin lamb dumplings with a turmeric wrapper that changed both of their lives.This episode is one of the most joyful, warm, and genuinely inspiring conversations The Perfect Bite has ever had. Two Bay Area women who love good food, care deeply about the people who grow it, and have spent nearly a decade proving that spice can be a vehicle for justice, storytelling, and extraordinary flavor.In this episode, we cover:Growing up with food: Sana eating all the graduation snacks at preschool, and Asha dictating recipes to her mom at age fourSana's time at high school in Italy and working on a vineyard and olive grove at 15Asha cold-walking into Market Hall Foods and gravitating to the cheese departmentThe turmeric latte trend that sparked Sana's curiosity about who was actually growing the turmericBuying a 350kg turmeric harvest with a $3K tax refund and storing it in a co-op basementSelling out in four days and waking up to 700 orders after Julia Turshen's New York Magazine mentionBuilding trust with farm partners by paying quadruple the commodity price on timeHow Asha slid into Sana's DMs with perfectly pleated dumplings and changed the trajectory of the brandThree months traveling across India and Sri Lanka for the cookbookThe pumpkin chutney discovered at the last possible moment in a kitchen in KashmirWhy they brought in regional cookware for every studio shoot (Kerala clay pots, Manipuri black pottery, Kashmiri copper)The strawberry cardamom bars that spike website traffic every springBusting myths about South Asian cooking: you can make most recipes in the cookbook with six spicesAn exclusive tease: Diaspora Spice Co. is opening a store (location and timing TBD)The Padma Lakshmi collaboration returning later this yearAsha's solo cookbook "Dinner Season" coming June 2027!Advice for founders: just start and get a good therapistFind Diaspora Spice Co.:Website: diasporaco.comInstagram and TikTok: @diasporacoAvailable in about 900 independent stores across the U.S, including Whole Foods CaliforniaThe Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook: available wherever books are soldSubscribe to The Perfect Bite podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen! Want to watch the entire episode? Head here to our YouTube!You can follow us on social media @perfectbitepod and sign up for our newsletter!