Meet The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook
We sat down with founder Sana Javeri Kadri and co-author/recipe developer Asha Loupy to hear all about their journey.
The first thing you notice about this cookbook that feels different is where the story begins. Not in a kitchen. Not with a recipe. But with a farm.
Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Spice Co., has spent the past several years traveling through India and Sri Lanka meeting the farmers who grow the spices that end up in jars on American shelves. Those visits—and the relationships behind them—form the backbone of the cookbook she wrote with collaborator and recipe developer Asha Loupy and photographer Malati Citrawireja.
Recipes appear throughout the book, but the real narrative belongs to the people behind the ingredients. Kadri describes the project as “a narrative journey tracing my love of spices and my encounters with families in India and Sri Lanka.”
Along the way, we realize that the spices we think of as spices are often what Kadri describes as 'dust.' "Sometimes the pepper you get in the supermarket is already five to seven years old." Kadri has made it her mission to reintroduce us to what we've been missing - the taste of vibrantly fresh spices enjoyed in the South Asian part of the world.
Before the Diaspora Spice Co, Kadri studied art, and approached the company less as a business opportunity than as a storytelling platform—as a queer woman-of-color, she wanted to foreground voices and experiences from the Global South.
“Finding a small brand, that’s super beautiful,” Kadri says of the kinds of producers she seeks out. “You’re creating connection with them. Making them successful.” Her goal is to restore the human relationships behind the spice trade. “Most of the time, these producers don’t have a brand,” she says. “The fact that it’s branded is just a by-product of the fact that I need someone to import it for us.”
Diaspora Spice Co. purchases spices directly from farmers and pays significantly more than commodity prices. “No middlemen. We buy farm-direct,” Kadri says. “We pay four times the commodity price.” This approach allows farmers to retain more value. For Kadri, it’s a small but concrete attempt to counter a global spice economy that has historically been shaped by colonial extraction and modern commodity markets.
Asha Loupy came into the story through a different route. When someone recommended Diaspora’s turmeric, she was working as a specialty grocery buyer. One taste, and Loupy reached out to Kadri through social media with a recipe using the spice. She says now that she “slid into Sana’s DMs.”
The message led to a conversation, then a collaboration, and eventually a job. When Loupy joined the company, Diaspora had just three spices and two part-time employees. Together they helped expand the catalog and develop the culinary voice that now runs through the cookbook.
For Loupy, the project carries an extra layer of meaning. As a South Asian adoptee, working on the book became a way to reconnect with the region’s food traditions and agricultural communities. She told me about time they were welcomed with a spontaneous “pakora party.” The family fried vegetables together while the guests watched and joined in. Even the men helped process vegetables," Loupy says. “It felt like such a warm welcome."
Those moments of hospitality and connection run throughout the cookbook, reminding readers that every spice begins not as a product but as a harvest. The book also explores how spices function in everyday cooking traditions, like the masala dabbas that every home cook in India personalizes with her own special spice blend.
A traditional round metal plate with separate containers of spices, Kadri remembers receiving her own from her mom. “The masala dabba tells you everything about how someone cooks,” she says. It's also a way to zero in on your personal home cooking flavor profile. For someone building their own, Kadri recommends beginning with a core group: turmeric, cumin, coriander, black mustard seed, black pepper, fennel, and curry leaves.
Kadri hopes the company’s growth can translate into tangible improvements for the people who grow its ingredients. Diaspora recently conducted a social-impact study examining what it would cost to pay every worker in its supply chain a global living wage. Today many farm workers earn between $3.20 and $4.20 per day. Raising that wage above five dollars would require roughly eighty cents more per worker per day. Across more than 5,000 workers and hundreds of working days each year, however, the numbers add up quickly. Kadri estimates the company will need to grow roughly tenfold to achieve that goal. Part of that would be creating storefronts. Another shift has been relocating much of the company’s marketing work to India so the storytelling around the spices can happen closer to the farms themselves. Today, Kadri says, members of the team sometimes write marketing materials directly from farmers’ homes.
Instead of beginning with flavor and ending with origin, Diaspora Spice Co starts with the farmers, the soil, the harvest, and the people whose lives shape the ingredients. Once you've read their stories and tried their vibrant recipes, you'll find, like me, that you'll never look at a jar of turmeric, saffron or cardamom the same way again.
Order the cookbook from Now Serving here.
