Sana Javeri Kadri finds flavor in sustainability

Sana Javeri Kadri’s obsession with spices originally started as a journalistic endeavor. In 2017, at 23 years old, she returned to her home country of India to visit farmers growing turmeric, planning a photo essay for a piece that would run in the magazine Roads & Kingdoms. After visiting more than two dozen farms on that trip, she eventually encountered what she describes as the “Goldilocks of turmeric,” a dramatically bright golden crop with floral notes that was also notably high in curcumin, the compound that gives turmeric its anti-inflammatory properties. “There are some [other] varieties that are high in curcumin, but they would be kind of brown and muddy and too earthy or sharp to use in cooking,” Javeri Kadri says. “Then I chanced upon the Pragati turmeric” — an heirloom variety that was being grown on just a few farms in India.

That fateful encounter gave Javeri Kadri the spark for what would become one of the culinary world’s most innovative new purveyors. Her company, Diaspora Spice Co., launched with a single-origin Pragati turmeric, grown by a farmer named Prabhu Kasaraneni, and has since bloomed into a growing force in an industry long dominated by stodgy multinational corporations who prioritized value and homogeneity (the latter to offer a consistent product at scale). 

With Diaspora Co., Javeri Kadri wanted to create a spice company that ensured farmers who grew their crops sustainably were compensated fairly. When they first met, Kasaraneni “was doing everything right,” Javeri Kadri says. “He was a self-taught regenerative farmer growing this beautiful turmeric, [but] he was making no money off of it.” 

In India, spices are typically sold in bulk to local auction houses, where they’re later sold to distributors. At these auction houses, farmers are often forced to accept low prices for their yield, and have no safety net in years when their crops don’t fare as well. Javeri Kadri decided to act as the middleman for Kasaraneni’s crop. “I’m pretty good at marketing, and [I knew people would] respond to his story, because it’s beautiful,” she says. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m gonna change the whole system.’ I was thinking maybe I can sell this one harvest.” She dropped $2,000 on 350 kilograms of the spice, and fortunately, her hunch was correct. After she started spreading the word to chefs and journalists, the turmeric sold out in just four days, and Diaspora Co. was born.

Now, the company works with more than 150 different multi-generational farmers in India and Sri Lanka, each of whom is paid an average of six times what they might be offered by their local auction house for their heirloom spices. And Javeri Kadri is in it for the long haul. She works with the Indian Institute of Spices Research to seek out crops grown from heirloom seeds, those often passed down through generations and prized for their quality, to guarantee farmers with those higher standards a fair wage and a sense of stability. She’s also invested time and money in the land itself, working to support farmers who employ regenerative agriculture practices, and empower those looking to break out of growing commodity turmeric with pesticides. 

In the years since that first spice trip to India, Diaspora Co. has grown exponentially, almost by necessity. Javeri Kadri likens what happened to the plot of the children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, which tells the story of a mouse who makes increasingly unhinged demands after receiving the titular cookie. “It was five years of baby steps, but if you give someone turmeric, they’re going to need cardamom,” Javeri Kadri says. “If you give a cook turmeric and cardamom, they’re going to need some black pepper… They want discovery, they want this newness, and if you give them all these options, they’re going to buy more from you. That’s not the same logic as, say, a coffee company or a potato chip company. Every dude with a business degree will tell you to ‘cut the long tail,’ but that’s just not how this works.” 

Less than a decade after its 2017 founding, Diaspora Co. now offers more than 40 spices, primarily sold direct-to-consumer online. In 2023, the company started selling spices in Whole Foods stores in Northern California, and has since continued to grow by debuting in small stockists like Toronto bookshop Good Egg and Just Like Heaven in New Orleans. 

Before starting the brand, Javeri Kadri’s only previous experience with agriculture was as a student working on the farm at Pomona College in southern California. At Pomona, Javeri Kadri, who got into photography and economics as a teen, majored in art. “In retrospect, it’s an odd combination,” she says. “But I loved how economics helped me make sense of the world in a very tangible, logical way, and how art helped me make sense of the world in a really emotional, beautiful way.” Doing freelance photography and working at Bi-Rite, a Bay Area grocery store that worked with California farmers, taught Javeri Kadri how to apply those instincts to storytelling about food. So as she traveled back to India, those experiences, paired with her own innate curiosity, were a boon as she worked to build relationships with farmers. 

“We were getting down and dirty, talking about soil and scanning the earthworms in the ground to see what we could improve,” she says. “I think the farmers were scratching their heads at why this nerd with a bad baby gay haircut was so interested in what they were doing, but they saw that I was really into learning more.” Javeri Kadri says she used that wide-eyed innocence to her advantage, which offered her the freedom to “ask all the stupid questions.” But her enthusiasm, she says, was infectious, and helped her make inroads with farmers who might have otherwise been skeptical of her youth and inexperience. 

Being from India — Javeri Kadri was raised in Mumbai to architect parents — helped. Javeri Kadri believes it would take 10 years or longer for a total outsider to come in and immerse themselves in Indian culture and cuisine before they had the same sourcing edge as her team did in the beginning — but it still took work. As a self-described “privileged urban Indian woman who now lives in America,” she acknowledges her experiences are worlds away from the farmers of rural India. What connects them is their love of agriculture, and their interconnected desire to produce an amazing product, be paid well, and live comfortable lives. 

“Being Indian and having that shared cultural understanding has been huge,” she says. “When I started out, I [didn’t know] that this was my superpower, or that it was important, but I know now that the relationships are the most important part. These are people I deeply care about, and I want us all to win.” Javeri Kadri feels like Diaspora Co. has succeeded as a social impact business: Most of the farmers she works with come back to sell to her year after year. 

In the company’s first five years, Javeri Kadri completely bootstrapped Diaspora Co. — while learning how to become a chief executive officer on the fly. (At the beginning, it was just Javeri Kadri and a part-time accountant, Sayed Ishtiyaque, loaned from her father’s architecture firm. Now, Ishtiyaque oversees the company’s entire operation in India, managing a 30-person team that handles procurement and logistics.) She’s learned how to handle farm crises, navigate the increasingly complicated landscape of import tariffs, and keep her relationships with farmers strong. And she’s done it while ensuring that her business could be financially sustainable enough to succeed, even though, by design, Diaspora Co. would never be a “$300 million, venture-backed company.” 

Javeri Kadri has made it a point to grow her company sustainably in an era where many investors are hungry for the prospect of scale at all costs. Her business is inherently strained by agricultural realities — growing seasons are immutable, and it takes time to get from seed to finished product — which isn’t appealing to growth-obsessed investors. As a result, Javeri Kadri says she’s been very intentional in taking money only from investors who believe in the business’s social mission as much as she does. “My older brother works in venture capital, and when you take venture capital money, you’re starting a clock [...] toward your exit,” Javeri Kadri says. “I don’t want to exit.” 

But as a result, “we’ve had to be very careful with our cash flow and to keep our spending very, very low.” She’s had to resist the temptations of spending on fancy influencer parties or “big, flashy, sexy” marketing activations, which she sometimes envies, along with unwanted advice from potential investors who tell her to limit her product line to the most profitable SKUs. And sometimes tough decisions have to be made. “In the beginning, I made decisions that were to the benefit of our farm partners, no matter what,” she says. “But now I have to balance the benefit of our farm partners and the continued existence of our company.” 

Sometimes a product, like Diaspora Co.’s fenugreek seeds, doesn’t sell as well as she’d like. Sometimes her company has to buy less of a certain spice because it tried a blend that wasn’t popular with consumers, and she’s had to learn how to have those conversations with farmers authentically. To do that, she says she’s leaned into vulnerability and transparency. She makes a point to speak directly with farmers in times when she has to deliver bad news, and to have the hard conversations as early as possible. 

At the same time, she has to navigate the expectations of consumers — particularly the chefs who use Diaspora Co.’s spices in their restaurants — for whom flavor is paramount. Diaspora Co.’s spices are so distinct from their commodity counterparts that Javeri Kadri describes their tasting notes like others would an expensive bottle of wine. Diaspora Co.’s black pepper “is fruity and has notes of nutmeg and jam. It makes you re-think what pepper can be.” The company’s Basiya ginger, grown on a 200-acre wooded farm in Central India, is equally fragrant and complex, with honeyed, buttery notes. The company’s retail prices reflect that the brand pays farmers more for their spices — while a bottle of commodity turmeric might only cost $3, a tin of Diaspora Co.’s Pragati Turmeric currently commands $12.50. But “all I have to do is get somebody to taste it, and then they’re hooked,” Javeri Kadri says. “It’s really hard to go back to bland turmeric once you’ve tried something this beautiful.” 

Despite the many proclamations of the death of retail, Javeri Kadri’s latest priority is to get her spices physically into the hands of prospective customers. “We want to, for the first time, give people the opportunity to taste the spices before they buy them,” she says. 

The first Diaspora Co. retail store will open in the coming months in San Francisco, and Javeri Kadri’s absolutely effusive about their potential for discovery. “We’ve had 11 pop-ups in two years, and each time, we’re seeing over a thousand people come out,” she says. The brand just published its first cookbook in spring 2026, which Javeri Kadri co-wrote with editor and recipe developer Asha Loupy. And while some founders might feel like they’ve made it and are looking for a profitable opportunity to move on to the next big idea, Javeri Kadri considers Diaspora Co. rooted to her own identity. 

“I’m such a classic eldest daughter who just wants to make the people who shaped me proud,” she says. “The business that I run today is a direct product of my family, and our family values, and my education. … Doing it the hard way, the right way, is so much more fun. You can be so much more smug. I’ve spent nine years kind of feeling morally superior, and I have bank-statement evidence that I’m doing this work better than anybody in the game. That’s worth it.”