Word: spicing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...while, a packaging idea comes along that changes a food category. Pringles proved you could stack potato chips in a can. Heinz showed you could sell an upside-down ketchup bottle. Now Katie Luber and Sara Engram are hoping they've hit on a paradigm shift for the spice industry: single-use, premeasured packets that reflect how cooks actually use seasonings--one teaspoon at a time...
When they first stumbled on the concept in 2005, Luber and Engram knew little about business and less about manufacturing. But as food lovers and avid cooks, they were tired of tossing out stale spices in jars that were half full--there's only so much nutmeg you can use in a year. By 2007, The Seasoned Palate (TSP) was shipping its first packages. A year later, the culinary entrepreneurs' Smart Spice brand is about to land in all 273 Whole Foods stores in the U.S. "This is the most innovative thing since the spice grinder," says Perry Abbenante, chief...
Neither of these spice gals had any prior industry experience. Before meeting Engram, Luber had been an art historian and a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Engram was a longtime editor at the Baltimore Sun. The pair met through a friend and got to talking about spices. "We started thinking about why they go stale," says Luber, "and about other categories that had exploded over the past 10 years, like tea, olive oil, vinegar and cereal." Sensing an opportunity, Luber and Engram began gathering advice on how to build a spice company...
They chose to go strictly organic, with none of the additives or fillers low-end discounters rely on. They're hoping that style will help: the company's other line, TSP Spices, comes in sleek decorative 12-packet tins topped with colorful labels. And consumers like their story. "People sometimes joke that we're the Spice Girls," says Engram, "but that's a stretch, so I came up with the CardaMoms. Cardamom is the queen of spices, and we're always carting around our kids to things...
Centuries before globalization became a buzzword, it took on a Portuguese accent. The reason was trade. By pioneering an eastbound passage around the Cape of Good Hope in the 15th century, Portugal dominated the spice routes and became a great mercantile power, establishing a presence in Africa, India, Sri Lanka and East Asia, where it had bases in Japan, China and Indonesia...