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They say variety is the spice of life, so this week we’re mixing it up and exploring three local companies offering spices and tea blends in various configurations. Beirut Spice Co. brings high-quality, sustainably sourced spices and seasonings direct from Lebanon to the U.S. Whole Spice Kitchen aims to make it simple to cook wholesome, favorite Indian meals at home, and Simply Bhonu offers special chai blends and an emphasis on Parsi cuisine.
Simply Bhonu
Over the course of her three decades or so in the food and hospitality industries, chef Perinaz (Peri) Avari has worked in high-end hotels in India, promoted Indian cuisine in China and, after moving to the Bay Area, founded food companies that catered to offices around Silicon Valley. Now she’s followed her heart by starting Simply Bhonu, a Menlo Park-based tea and spice brand that pays tribute to her heritage and aims to make Indian – and especially Parsi – cuisine more accessible to home chefs.
Avari grew up in Mumbai, India, and is of Parsi heritage. Parsi culture stems from Zoroastrian Persians who, fleeing persecution, immigrated to western India around the eighth century C.E. and developed a regional Parsi culinary style that fuses Persian flavors and techniques with Indian ones, she said. Parsi dishes often have a distinctive balance between tartness and sweetness, for example, thanks to blends of sugar and vinegar or lemon, she said.
While she’s enjoyed her food and hospitality work over the years, “this is more my dream, my passion,” Avari said of her company, which she launched in 2022 and which was all started by her penchant for a great cup of tea.
“I love chai. I’ve been making this blend forever,” she said of the cozy, classic Indian beverage, which marries strong black tea with warming, flavorful spices. Avari said she’s perfected her own version of masala chai with cardamom, ginger root, nutmeg and mint after years of brewing it at home each morning.
Avari has also developed her take on a Parsi choi (the Parsi word for tea), featuring lemongrass, mint and rose petals, offering a more delicate, herbal profile than traditional masala chai.
“I like to say, ‘Have the masala chai in the morning, when you need that hit of spices. In the afternoon, have the Parsi chai,'” Avari said.
Both chai blends are available as loose-leaf tea, which is Avari’s preferred brewing method. Avari had personally stopped using tea bags altogether, dismayed by what she’d learned about many bags being made with unnecessary plastics. But “really quickly the market had spoken and they wanted tea bags,” she said. She spent six months hunting for a more eco-friendly option and now also offers both blends in plant-based bags as well.
“No strings, no staples, no tags: You just put in the compost,” she noted.
Last year, she expanded beyond chai to include spices. Simply Bhonu (bhonu means “food” in Parsi) currently offers blends including seasonal mulling spices, garam masala (a multipurpose Indian staple made of cardamom, black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander and nutmeg), and her signature Parsi Dhansak Vaghar blend made of onion, jaggery (an unrefined sugar), red chili pepper, cumin, tamarind, coriander, mustard, salt, ginger, cardamon, garlic and cinnamon. The package contains instructions for making the complete dish – just add lentils, a bit of salt, vegetables and an optional protein of your choice.
The goal is to provide “spices that will make life easier when you put it in one pot and cook an Indian meal for, like, six people,” she said. “The idea is (about) simplifying life when Indian cooking is concerned.”
Simply Bhonu sources its spices from an Indian distributor in Berkeley and San Francisco Herb Co. The black tea is imported from Assam, in northeastern India. Avari hopes to add more Indian and Parsi seasoning blends to her line eventually.
Simply Bhonu’s products are available online and at pop-up markets and events around the Peninsula and San Francisco. They’re also in stock at Little Green in Redwood City. Avari shares recipes for her takes on Parsi and Indian meals via her blog, Peri’s Spice Ladle, as well as via several e-cookbooks.
Avari, who also teaches group and private cooking classes, hopes to get Simply Bhonu products into more retail locations over the next year. For now, she’s relishing her time meeting potential customers face-to-face.
“I love talking to people in person,” she said.
More information is available at simplybhonu.com.
Beirut Spice Co.
Naseem and Tina Raad, the husband-and-wife duo behind Beirut Spice Co., grew up in both Lebanon and locally (in Los Gatos and Daly City, respectively), and they still split their time between Lebanon and the Bay Area. They founded their company with the goal of contributing positively to the Lebanese economy, which has been in crisis for the past several years.
They asked themselves, “What products do we have available that we could export and sell on the international market?” Naseem Raad recalled. “I was talking to my uncle and he mentioned that he had met this farmer who was the head of a co-op, who gathered products from a number of sources.”
This planted a seed of an idea to help support Lebanese independent farmers by exporting their high-quality herbs and spices.
“We identified spices that were ready to go, set up the supply chain, registered with the FDA, worked with customs and brought it in,” Naseem Raad said. “We do fair trade with the farmers. We share our profits transparently with them; that’s kind of the core of this process.”
Beirut Spice Co. was launched about a year and a half ago and currently offers spices and seasoning blends, including za’atar (wild thyme, sumac and toasted sesame seeds, also available in a spicy blend), Aleppo pepper and several salt mixes.
Tina Raad’s personal favorite is the Mediterranean sea salt blend, with rosemary, dried onion, oregano, wild thyme, smoked chili flakes, dried parsley and fennel seed.
“I put it with everything – chicken, pasta, avocado, salmon, eggs,” she said. “I don’t have to think about what to mix together; it’s all already thought of for me.”
The company is also focused on sustainable agriculture, using noninvasive plants that have been flourishing in Lebanon for millennia and are harvested with traditional methods.
“We weren’t interested in bringing something in that involved a lot of water or wasn’t natural to the area,” Naseem Raad said. “These are herbs and spices that grow very naturally.”
They’re also proud that their products are vacuum sealed for freshness, as opposed to using citric acid or oils as preservatives.
Although the Raads are new to the supply chain and import-export world, Tina Raad does have some experience in the food and beverage industry in the United States, having worked as a hotel manager as well as selling homemade jams and jellies at farmers markets about a decade ago.
Because of her background, “I’m the leading force of the in-person markets we do for the spices,” she said. “I like to be out in the community and meet people and connect with small businesses.”
San Francisco is now their U.S. base, and they’re bringing their products to markets and events around the Bay Area, including on the Peninsula. Over the summer they were part of the annual Lebanese Festival in Redwood City and, in late December, came to Head West Marketplace in downtown San Mateo.
They have warehouses on the West Coast and East Coast and sell all their products online via their website and on Amazon, as well as in a few retail stores (in San Francisco and Pleasanton). They hope to expand into wholesale on a larger scale eventually.
“There is a market for Mediterranean spices and products and goods,” Naseem Raad said. “The Mediterranean diet, and Middle Eastern foods, are trending really well in the Bay.”
Though the company is a new one – “We’re still babies, in the business sense,” Naseem Raad said – they’re optimistic for the future.
Above all, they’re keeping their mission to bring all-natural Middle Eastern flavors to the U.S. while sustainably nurturing Lebanon’s economy at the forefront. The Raads are full of appreciation for their employees in Lebanon, who have persevered under tumultuous conditions to deliver high-quality products ahead of time, even during periods of increased danger, upheaval and wartime conditions.
“We’re trying to build up sectors from the ground up,” Naseem Raad said. “Employing people and doing it through business, in a way that doesn’t prey on the farmers, and we hope that it continues from there.”
More information is available at beirutspice.co.
Whole Spice Kitchen
Leena Jadhav grew up loving the delicious Indian food prepared by her mother. But she didn’t actually learn to cook until she became a mother herself and started getting more interested in nutrition and food.
“I essentially just did a lot of research, trial and error, so many cookbooks,” she said.
When her daughter went off to college, she missed these home-cooked family meals.
“(My daughter) got her first apartment, and she wanted to make some of these dishes,” Jadhav said. “With Indian food, it requires a lot of different spices and speciality ingredients. Some of them are hard to find.”
She wrote down her favorite recipes and gathered ingredients, sending them off in care packages to her daughter, whose roommates also enjoyed being able to make fresh Indian meals at home. Meanwhile, Jadhav’s friends also expressed an interest in trying Indian cooking but didn’t know where to start.
“It shouldn’t be this hard to make these dishes; the hardest part is getting all the ingredients, having them on hand,” she recalled thinking.
In 2022 she began testing and experimenting to come up with recipe starters to make Indian cooking at home more user-friendly for the general public. And in 2023, Whole Spice Kitchen was launched.
The company, which operates out of a commercial kitchen in San Mateo, gives customers shelf-stable, pre-portioned whole and ground spices, detailed recipes and dry goods such as rice, beans or lentils. These ingredients can be used to make meals such as palak paneer, achari chicken, black-eyed peas with spinach and split red lentils with basmati rice. Cooking methods include options for pressure cooking, stovetop and oven preparation, depending on the recipe.
No preservatives or processed items are used, according to Whole Spice Kitchen’s website. Customers add proteins and vegetables to complete the meal (along with pantry staples, such as cooking oil).
“These are dishes I grew up eating and enjoy making for our family,” Jadhav said. While she loves them all, “If I had to choose one it would be the cauliflower (with turmeric and green chilis),” she said, which comes with a recipe and two spice mixes.
Indian cuisine, she said, is nutrient rich. It’s typically made with fresh vegetables and lean- and plant-based proteins, and it boasts anti-inflammatory properties thanks to the spices (which also give it plenty of flavor).
“It’s inherently healthy in that way,” she said.
And while not all of her recipes are plant-based, “I have a lot of customers starting a vegan (or vegetarian) lifestyle, or they just want more options for vegetables,” she said.
The products are available online, as well at select pop-ups and at the San Mateo Farmers’ Market. Jadhav obtains her spices from Bay Area spice merchants.
The company is “100% direct-to-consumer right now,” she said. “I really like to be able to talk to our customers (in person or via email). I want to make sure that all the questions are answered.”
She likes the idea of eventually offering products in local, independent grocery shops as well, and hopes to add more recipes to her offerings soon, including some regional specialties.
Jadhav has never started a business or worked in the food industry before.
“All this is an incredible new adventure of learning and experiments,” she said.
Her hope is to help others in the way that she helped her daughter and her college friends – making it easy and convenient to prepare fresh Indian food and get the pleasurably creative and sensory experience of working hands-on with whole ingredients.
“There are so many options to eat out, order out, buy premade food,” she said. “I do really want to support folks who want to cook at home, who want to take charge of what they’re making, what ingredients they’re using, what they’re cooking for their family.”
More information is available at wholespicekitchen.com.
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