Diaspora Co. Mints $2.1 Million In Fresh Financing To Build An Equitable Spice Trade

When Sana Javeri Kadri first arrived at Abraham Chacko’s farm over four years ago, he was quite skeptical to see a new buyer. “My previous customers…always used to find some fault [in my product], like the size is small, or the color is bad, or there are insect bites. They always used to make me feel inferior.”

Chacko supplies cardamom to Diaspora Co., which according to Kadri is among the best in the business. Chacko shares, “Sana tested my product and found it superior to all the rest of the samples she had collected. This really motivated me. Somebody appreciated my products.”

Kadri is the founder and CEO of Diaspora Co., a high-quality, sustainably-focused spice business based out of Oakland, CA. She recently closed a financing round of $2.1 million to expand her supply chain and build her team. And she is re-imagining the spice trade as she builds.

Forging new trade routes

Diaspora Co. was born out of Kadri’s drive to build a more equitable spice trade in her home country of India. As the company grew over the pandemic, sourcing quality spices became a challenge. Diaspora Co. was often sold out of the most popular SKUs of aranya pepper, baraka cardamom, and pragati turmeric.

With deep colonial roots, the traditional spice trade leaves farmers in poverty due to wildly unstable commodity prices, a zigzagging route to market, and the inability to access pre-harvest financing. Compounded with skyrocketing food prices, some farmers spend upwards of 75% of their budget to feed their families, leaving nothing leftover to invest in the farm.

Diaspora Co.’s promise to consumers is to bring fresh spices to market directly from smallholder farmers who use regenerative growing practices. Kadri estimates that there are millions of smallholder farmers in India, and the company currently works with around 200 of them.

A major bottleneck to the company’s growth has been farmer’s access to very simple equipment like a garlic peeler or a laser leveler. “We can go from getting 100 kilograms a year of mind blowing heirloom garlic powder to getting two metric tons with the purchase of simple equipment. In some cases, equipment purchasing will straight up 20x
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our supply, from the same farmer,” Kadri shares.

A fundraise to fuel growth

When Chacko’s baraka cardamom sold out on the Diaspora Co. website, he was unable to expand his supply due to aging processing equipment. Subsequently, the company was often sold out of this popular spice. This story repeated itself with many of the spices that Diaspora Co. was bringing to market, prompting Kadri to search for financing solutions.

Finding a values-aligned investment partner was critical to Kadri. She ultimately partnered with Pentland Ventures, a U.K. based family office that has also invested in U.S. based East Fork Pottery. Pentland Ventures is an arm of the $9BN U.K. based Pentland Group, who owns brands like Speedo and Lacoste. The introduction was made by East Fork founder CEO Connie Matisse, who is a mentor to Kadri.

Kadri was cautious about fundraising in the current environment. “I’m responsible for 200 farmers who like to look to us for a majority of their income. There’s the world of valuations and growth. And then there’s a world of farms and farmers and things grown in the ground. In raising this round I had to constantly think, ‘what honors both of those things?’” She says. “I started this company not really for it to be a unicorn. Our numbers are great and we’re profitable. The math makes sense. But I started this company for impact and flavor and the cultural piece. So that’s what we’re raising around. Being able to push that work forward.”

The results? Diaspora Co. pays 6x the commodity price to farmers. In 2019 the company generated $19,000 in revenue for its farmer suppliers. By 2021 that number had skyrocketed to over $1 million.

This latest financing will go towards granting zero-interest loans for farmers, providing pre-harvest financing, and building out a larger team to support growth. Kadri says, “We are a young queer team kind of figuring it out. And we love figuring it out. But I’ve also come to the point where everybody on the team is ready to bring on folks who’ve done this before.”

Build an advisory board and extending the brand

In addition to funding, Kadri is launching an advisory board of industry luminaries including founders Merrill Stubbs (Food 52) and Ellen Bennett (Hedley and Bennett), Franco Fubini (Natoora) and Will Rosenzweig (The Republic of Tea).

Bennett, who built a multi-million dollar kitchenware brand, shares that after bootstrapping Hadley and Bennett for eight years, “There’s so much for me to be able to share with Sana about mistakes I made along the journey and different learnings I’ve had, especially on growth. Growth can be great, but at what cost? Right now with the world and the state that it’s in, there’s good growth and there’s bad growth, and so really approaching it from a thoughtful perspective and in community is what I am excited about.”

In addition to building a new advisory board, Kadri has the support of angel investors like Meena Harris who said, “As I got to know the company and Sana more, the brand positioning as well as their commitment to equity and community made it an obvious fit for me.” Kadri also recently announced a cookbook deal with Harper Collins, and continues to expand brand partnerships.

As for the future, Kadri envisions a company that could raise several rounds and grow to be very large, or it could stay small and niche. In the meantime, she has found values-aligned investors. She says, “There are there are many routes we can take. And our investors are very much on board. They have told me, ‘we just want to put good capital in the hands of good people.’”