In 2012, Ethan Frisch was working for a development organization in Afghanistan when he saw a vendor selling wild cumin at a local market.
“I thought I knew my way around spices,” said Mr. Frisch, 38, recalling his experience at the market in Badakhshan Province. “But I had never tasted anything like this.”
Mr. Frisch had worked as a cook in London, where he attended graduate school for international development, and in New York, including time at Tabla, the fine-dining Indian restaurant by the chef Floyd Cardoz and the restaurateur Danny Meyer. He started bringing bags of cumin home to New York to share with friends in the restaurant industry, garnering rave reviews with each taste. He realized that there was a market for spices sourced directly from farmers.
In 2016, he started Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company, with his friend Ori Zohar. The two had collaborated years earlier on Guerrilla Ice Cream, a roving ice cream cart that served flavors inspired by political and activist movements. Mr. Zohar came from a business background, working in marketing and advertising, and helped found a tech start-up that shut down in 2017.
Mr. Frisch put his life savings — about $20,000 — into starting the business. He ran it out of his one-bedroom apartment in Queens, cold-calling restaurants and showing up to kitchens with a backpack full of spices to give chefs a taste. He built up a base of spice suppliers, using skills and connections he developed while working with the Aga Khan Foundation on rural infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, and doing logistics for Doctors Without Borders in Jordan.
For years, Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar flew overseas to stock up on inventory, returning with duffel bags full of cardamom, cumin, nutmeg and more. They would bring back enough spices to “fund the cost of the trip,” Mr. Frisch said. (“I had some funny conversations with the customs officers,” he added.)
In 2019, Burlap & Barrel embarked on its first chef collaboration: a line of masala spice blends with Mr. Cardoz.
After Mr. Cardoz died from Covid-19 in March 2020, his wife, Barkha Cardoz, continued to work with Burlap & Barrel, releasing the blends in October 2020, in honor of what would have been Mr. Cardoz’s 60th birthday. The company received more than a thousand orders that day — its biggest day of sales at that time.
The founders realized that there was “a way to connect a home-cook audience to a chef, through a spice blend,” Mr. Frisch said, and collaborations became a core part of their business. Amid the early months of the pandemic, Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar saw an increase in orders as more people made their meals at home.
In April 2023, another breakthrough moment came when they appeared on the reality TV show “Shark Tank.”
“It almost doesn’t even taste like conventional cinnamon — I mean, it’s, like, incomparable,” Gwyneth Paltrow, a guest “Shark,” said after trying the brand’s Royal Cinnamon variety from Vietnam.
Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar didn’t end up with a deal, but they gained publicity and a surge of new customers. In 2024, the company did about $9 million in sales, according to Mr. Frisch.
Over the years, they have collaborated with chefs including Marc Murphy; Ashleigh Shanti; Sohla and Ham El-Waylly, who are New York Times contributors; and the fashion designer and cookbook author Peter Som. Recently, they teamed up with Martha Stewart on a poultry seasoning, and with Jane Goodall on jars of honey from the Miombo woodlands of Tanzania.
Now, more than eight years later, what began as a scrappy passion project is a growing brand and social enterprise with big-name collaborations, home-cook devotees, celebrity fans and cameos in the background of the FX show “The Bear.”
The chefs Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate, founders of Honeysuckle Provisions, an Afrocentric grocery and cafe in West Philadelphia that was named one of Eater’s best new restaurants of 2023, collaborated with Burlap & Barrel. They wanted to work with them, Mr. Tate said, both because of the sheer flavor of the spices, and because of their ethical and intentional approach to working with farmers.
“They make sure that the communities that they are sourcing from are respected — not just through the ingredients that are being extracted and that they’re exporting to make these profits, but they’re also redistributing that wealth to the community,” Mr. Tate said.
At Hani’s Bakery and Cafe in Lower Manhattan — a new spot from Miro Uskokovic, the former Gramercy Tavern pastry chef, and his wife, Shilpa Uskokovic, an editor at Bon Appétit — Burlap & Barrel’s Royal Cinnamon is used in their popular malted cinnamon buns.
The cinnamon “is the only one we’ve found that offers the right combination of strength and florality to stand up to all that cream cheese and butter,” Mr. Uskokovic wrote in an email.
“As a chef, the one thing that we have always lacked is any kind of traceability or any kind of transparency in spices, in herbs,” said Rick Bayless, the celebrated Chicago chef and restaurateur who specializes in Mexican cuisine. “When I found Burlap & Barrel, I wanted to get to know these guys and see what they were doing, because they were telling stories about who grew this cumin and who grew these peppercorns.”
Transparency and storytelling is at the heart of the business. As what’s known as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company that focuses on contributing to a social good — Burlap & Barrel seeks “to connect smallholder farmers to high-value markets,” said Mr. Zohar, 39.
“Our business works because we’re paying the farmers more, which then allows the farmers to not just grow the spices, but they clean the spices, they dry the spices, they grind the spices, they prepare them for export,” he said.
The company now consists of 20 people, most of whom are contractors, and works with farmers in about 30 countries including Vietnam, Turkey and Guatemala, often helping with the logistics of the export process. The founders visit farms to meet the farmers and see firsthand the practices and products of each potential partner.
Shadel Nyack Compton, the owner and managing director of Belmont Estate, a family farm and tourist destination in Grenada, works with Burlap & Barrel to sell nutmeg and bay leaves. The farm — whose main crop is cocoa — has been in her family for 80 years.
In 2021, Ms. Nyack Compton found Burlap & Barrel online. She was looking for new business and wanted to work with a company that was interested in developing a relationship with farmers. “We want our story to be told,” she said.
“Spices represent a lot to a lot of different people,” Mr. Frisch said. “A spice jar becomes a way to tell a story, to evoke a memory, to teach about a culture or a cuisine, to give someone the opportunity to do their own cooking in a different way.”
Burlap & Barrel is unique, Ms. Nyack Compton said, because the company works to “establish this kind of equitable, transparent supply chain,” an approach she said is more often seen in the cocoa and chocolate space. With spices, she said, “it’s very novel.”
