With an artist’s flair and a dedication to fairness for South Asian farmers, Sana Javeri Kadri ’16 and her Diaspora Co. are shaking up the spice industry. Photo by Gentl and Hyers. Additional photography courtesy of Diaspora Co.

Black pepper, with its biting heat and piney taste, comes to many of us in the West in grocery store grinders and is used in cuisines throughout the world. Chocolate, with flavor profiles ranging from milky or bittersweet to notes of berries, often is associated with places like Belgium and Switzerland.

Top left, cocoa being processed into chocolate (bottom left). Top right, a man holding a peppercorn, which is dried and milled into black pepper (bottom right).

But CEO and spice merchant Sana Javeri Kadri ’16 and her business Diaspora Co. are here to remind us that the bulk of our spices aren’t native to Europe or America—and their true flavors and colors aren’t what we’re buying in conventional markets. Black pepper, for instance, hails from the steamy shade of the southernmost and very tropical state of Kerala, in India, and can have a more complex, fruit-forward taste, even coming in shades of purple.

1. Cacao, 2. Mace, 3. Nutmeg, 4. Aranya Pepper, 5. Baraka Cardamom, 6. Bindu Black Mustard, 7. Byadgi Chillies, 8. Chota Tingrai Black Tea, 9. Guntur Sannam Chillies, 10. Hariyali Fennel, 11. Kandyan Cloves, 12. Kashmiri Chillies, 13. Kashmiri Saffron, 14. Kaveri Vanilla, 15. Kudligi Moringa, 16. Madhur Jaggery, 17. Makhir Ginger, 18. Jodhana Cumin, 19. Nandini Coriander, 20. Pahadi Pink Garlic, 21. Panneer Rose, 22. Peni Miris Cinnamon, 23. Pragati Turmeric, 24. Sirārakhong Hāthei Chillies, 25. Sugandhi Fenugreek, 26. Surya Salt, 27. Wild Ajwain, 28. Wild Heimang Sumac, 29. Wild Cinnamon Quills

Javeri Kadri is here for more than a lesson, however. She is set on surprising palates with the taste of fresh top-shelf spices, and she’s determined to disrupt the spice industry by paying a living wage to Indian and Sri Lankan farmers.

Diaspora Co., established by Javeri Kadri in 2017 when she was 23 years old, has made a culinary splash in the industry, the media and home kitchens. In short order, Javeri Kadri was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for the food and drink industry for her successful entrepreneurship. She and her company have been featured everywhere from CBS Mornings to Condé Nast Traveler, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine magazines and many more outlets. Whole Foods Market recently selected Diaspora Co. to be among 10 startup participants in the Local and Emerging Accelerator Program (LEAP), an initiative that launched last year offering mentorship, education and potential financial support to up-and-coming food and beverage brands. Over the years, Allure and The Cut have even detailed Javeri Kadri’s skincare and haircare routines—further proof of her celebrity spice trader status.

Throughout her time on campus, Javeri Kadri was heavily involved in the Pomona College Organic Farm.

Long before she was a rising star in the spice business, Javeri Kadri was a kid foodie. In nursery school she would go to the kitchen and eat all her classmates’ snacks—apparently without remorse. The running joke in her household was that if 3-year-old Javeri Kadri were kidnapped, she would be promptly returned home due to her insatiable appetite.

Her passion for food, which started as a toddler in Mumbai, inspired Javeri Kadri to study the slow food movement at an international high school in Italy. Then she arrived in Claremont. An art major, Javeri Kadri was profoundly influenced by Pomona College Art Professor Lisa Anne Auerbach and Art History Professor Phyllis Jackson, and eventually creatively combined her interests in photography and food justice.

But on Day One at Pomona, Javeri Kadri fell head over heels in love with the Organic Farm and agriculture. She spent virtually every day there, as a farmworker for the first two years and then teaching farming and cooking.

During her sophomore year, Javeri Kadri took a semester off to study regenerative agriculture and sustainable food systems. This wasn’t just a matter of interest; it was a matter of making a return on her parents’ investment in her.

“There was this feeling for me that being at an American liberal arts college was the greatest privilege of my life and the greatest expense my parents would ever incur,” she says.

Javeri Kadri knew she had to make good on her parents’ sacrifice. So while they never pressured her to pursue a particular major or vocation, they did impress upon her that it was critical she graduate with a clear plan. So during her semester leave she got a job at an urban farm, another job at a bakery, worked at a restaurant and found every single mentor she possibly could in New York. She says she returned to campus with all the tools she needed to start her long-term career journey, which she ultimately describes as telling stories around agriculture and food systems.

Sana Javeri Kadri ‘16, an art major at Pomona, keeps her camera close at hand in her travels. She is photographed here standing in a field on a Kashmiri saffron farm.

As a Pomona junior, she started the Claremont Food Justice Summit, which later turned into Food Week and brought in speakers from all over the country. This was certainly educational for The Claremont Colleges community, but it also was aspirational individually. Javeri Kadri says she networked relentlessly.

In the midst of the self-described hustling, Javeri Kadri also was working on her senior art thesis, which was about the effects of colonialism on food, specifically British colonialism on Indian cuisine. Javeri Kadri’s point of inquiry was chai. Through her thesis, she learned that spices on grocery store shelves are very old and very stale and that the industry doesn’t prioritize freshness or quality, she says. She also learned that spice farmers make almost no money. For at least four centuries, she says, the industry has been built to profit middlemen, not the farmers.

But economics wasn’t the only aspect that disturbed Javeri Kadri. Cultural whitewashing did as well. Situating spices in their indigenous contexts was critical for her.

“If a spice is coming from the hills of northern Kerala, people should know what northern Kerala pepper recipes are and how amazing they are,” she says. “It is partially about right or wrong, but it’s also delicious.”

Local farmers at a floating vegetable market on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir, India. Photography by Sana Javeri Kadri ’16 on a sourcing trip to visit saffron and Kashmiri chilli farm partners.

“Right,” “wrong” and “delicious” may be shorthand for Javeri Kadri’s philosophy of business for Diaspora Co., which promises that its farmers get a fair living wage and aims to disrupt the industry’s unsustainable farming practices and discrediting of culture, while also supplying fresh, delectable spices.

Origin, equity and—unsurprisingly for an art major—even beauty are paramount principles for Javeri Kadri’s business. Diaspora Co.’s Instagram profile (@diasporaco) and website (diasporaco.com) reveal stunning photography, much of it by Javeri Kadri, and thoughtful narratives.

There are photos of the intricate designs on Diaspora Co.’s vibrant marigold and raspberry-colored tins; a shot of Pahadi pink garlic, with its cream-edged petals, cradled in the hands of a farmer at the harvest in the lush mountains of Uttarakhand in northern India. There are videos to stimulate salivary glands, like a recipe for corn ribs with smoky chili-saffron butter and a chai masala cocktail, which is a combination of Diaspora Co.’s house chai masala, jaggery syrup and a black-tea infused bourbon. Another video traces the production of cinnamon, from tree bark to quill, in Kandy, Sri Lanka. A slideshow depicts a pile of sand’s transformation into a gleaming bronze mortar and pestle. Javeri Kadri, of course, is an installation artist by training, and she jokes this venture started off as one big art project.

“I’m not going to get into business unless I can build it the most beautifully and idealistically as I can. … Is it possible to build the most equitable form of the spice trade and make it beautiful?”

A professional food and culture photographer earlier in her career, Javeri Kadri is the artist behind many of the photos on Diaspora Co.’s distinctive Instagram. Check out other photos @diasporaco.

Evidently, the answer is yes. The art project evolved into a company that works with 140 farmers and pays an average of three to even 10 times over the going commodity price. Javeri Kadri acknowledges that Diaspora Co. spices fall on the luxury end of the spectrum, price-wise. According to a Los Angeles Times writer’s description, the taste also is premium—Diaspora’s Aranya pepper is not just peppery, “but also extra-ripe-strawberry fruity, and with some actual heat on the tongue.”

Javeri Kadri is quick to acknowledge that Diaspora Co. is not perfect, but what she appreciates most is her team and how they keep one another honest, accountable and forever on a growing edge. Her hope for her business is that what is now a luxury for a few will become the standard for the industry at large: better sourcing, better salaries, better spices.

Sourcing is among the most critical ingredients and challenges for their business. Pragati turmeric from Vijayawada in the state of Andhra Pradesh, in southeast India, was the first spice that Javeri Kadri sourced. Diaspora Co., which now sells 30 spices, only launches a spice after rigorous testing and tasting on two continents and once they believe it’s the best of its kind on the market. It took four years to find fennel that met its criteria. The quest for the finest dried mango powder is ongoing.

The transformational effect of Diaspora Co. on its farming partners is astounding, Javeri Kadri says. As the farmers’ wages increase, naturally their lifestyle does as well and there are tangible and significant markers even in the span of six years. After Year One, the farmers may buy a smartphone. After another year, they send their children to a better school. One more, and they are willing to talk about paying their workers more. After the fourth year, they start to think about how they can get similar returns on their other spice crops, since most are growing multiple varieties. Diaspora also has a farmworker fund divided amongst their three oldest farm partners (turmeric, pepper and cardamom farmers) and each farmer receives $7,000. These funds go toward building women’s toilets, establishing medical camps, setting aside land for a kitchen garden for the farmworkers, and other projects.

Diaspora Co. is a small company but for the farmers, it is a mighty one. Since 2019, Diaspora has paid out $2.1 million to 140 regenerative farms. In 2022, the company purchased 16 metric tons of spices. Diaspora started with a modest investment of $8,000 from Javeri Kadri’s parents and the entirety of her tax refund of $3,000. Over the years, it has been supported in part by family, friends and operator angels—angel investors who also are food industry mentors, including chefs and CEOs.

Even deeper than Javeri Kadri’s love for spices is her passion for social justice. It is arguably coded in her DNA. Her paternal grandmother started a nonprofit in the 1980s called Save the Children India (no relation to Save the Children USA), which became a large organization focused on serving underprivileged children and children with disabilities. Javeri Kadri grew up visiting the rural hospital her grandmother built.

“The family business is architecture, but it was also service,” Javeri Kadri says. Her father’s ongoing reminder was that they had great privilege, so much was required of them.

“I grew up upper class in Mumbai. It’s a lot. And then was able to go to the world’s best schools on three continents,” she says. “So how am I going to use that and how am I going to pay that forward?”

By dealing spices—with equity, beauty and, of course, taste.

Cathy Corison ’75, standing in her vineyard along Napa Valley’s St. Helena Highway, started making cabernet sauvignon before she had a vineyard or a winery of her own. Photography by Robert Durell

In a vineyard in full green flourish under a bright blue sky, Cathy Corison ’75 is caressing a cluster of grapes.

She’s showing off a little. Corison’s small winery and vineyard are tucked in among much bigger names along St. Helena Highway, the tree-lined central axis around which Northern California vino revolves. But these little green grapes, a few weeks away from ripening and harvest beginning in mid-September, are hers. They’re the beating heart of Corison’s if-you-know-you-know cult-fave cabernet sauvignon. And she takes very good care of them.

The vines in one of the Corison Winery vineyards are five decades old. “I so value these gnarly old ladies,” says Cathy Corison ’75. “It’s like a sculpture garden.” Photography by Robert Durell

The grape clusters hang from thick, twisted trunks, gray as driftwood, that seem to reach toward each other all along their martial ranks. The vines are five decades old, ancient by Napa standards. “I so value these gnarly old ladies,” Corison says, pushing a leaf aside. “It’s like a sculpture garden.”

Except it’s all alive, of course. A stalwart Napa winemaker, Corison is well known for spending a lot of time out among her vines. She works with simple parameters—loamy soil that holds the rain, so Corison barely needs to irrigate, and the Napa Valley climate, which is optimum for growing world-class cabernet sauvignon: hot days, cold nights. “We work hard to get the right amount of air and light in to the fruit for color and flavor development,” she says.

Corison makes artful, classic Napa cabs—lower in alcohol with brighter flavors and what the language of connoisseurship calls “structure,” an elegant and well-defined progression of aromas and flavors. But there is fashion in winemaking like anything else, and those kinds of wines went out of style in the late 1980s. The last few years at Corison Winery have been better, the awards and accolades (and sales) a vindication for her approach. But that was never a sure thing. Corison has always been an outlier.

“When I started this project, this wine was fully formed in my head. Power and elegance. Cabernet is always powerful, but is far more interesting to me at the intersection of elegance,” she says. “Good wine can be made by a committee. Great wine cannot. It reflects the hand of the maker.”

At Pomona, Corison was a competitive springboard diver. The school didn’t have a women’s team, so she joined the men’s team—lettered in the sport, even. Part of her training was tumbling on a trampoline, so when the opportunity came up for people in the campus community to teach short noncredit classes, she volunteered to instruct other Sagehens on how to take those big, bouncing leaps.

At the sign-up fair, at the table adjacent to Corison’s, a young professor was offering a wine appreciation class. This was John Haeger, an expert in the Sung Dynasty with a serious wine collecting hobby. (Today Haeger is a big-deal writer on the subject.) Corison was just 19, but beer and wine flowed more freely on campus back then. On a whim, she signed up.

The tastings were on Sundays at Haeger’s house. All the wines were French and delicious, and the classes were fun. For Corison, though, they were more than that. The agronomy of grapevines, sugar transformed by yeast into alcohol, the chemistry of wine production, the flavor of wood from barrels…she was hooked. “What really grabbed me is that wine is a collaboration among a whole series of living systems; the result is the alchemy that is wine,” Corison says.

She graduated with a biology degree, and two days after graduation, she went to Napa. This was almost 50 years ago; there were just 30 wineries in Napa then, but some of them were starting to make genuinely great wine—from now-iconic vintners like Robert Mondavi and Donn Chappellet ’54, himself a Pomona grad.

Cathy Corison ’75 earned a master’s degree in enology at UC Davis, where she also studied viticulture. Photography by Robert Durell

Then, a year after Corison showed up in Napa, Napa showed up in France. At a now-famous tasting at Le Grand Hôtel in Paris (today it’s the InterContinental Paris le Grand), nine big-shot sommeliers and restaurateurs judged—blind, meaning no one knew which glass held which wine—Napa chardonnays versus French white Burgundies, and Napa cabernet sauvignons versus cab-dominated red blends from Bordeaux. The results were all over the map, statistically and literally, but the boozy score at the end of the night was as undeniable as a hangover: The Californians—sacrée merde!—won. And a reporter from Time magazine was there to file the news. What came to be known as the Judgment of Paris made Napa into a world-class wine producer, and Corison was in the thick of it. “It was blind luck, but it catapulted the Napa Valley onto the world stage,” she says.

Corison started a master’s program at UC Davis, taking classes in both winemaking and the care of grapevines—enology and viticulture—still considered somewhat separate realms even today. And she started working at wineries, even though women were scarce in winemaking back then. She ended up heading the winery for Chappellet Vineyard. “She had both academic knowledge and also knowledge from working at Freemark Abbey and Yverdon, a lot of real-world experience,” says Phillip Corallo-Titus, one of Corison’s assistants at Chappellet’s winery and, today, the head winemaker there. “She just knew a lot about winemaking that I didn’t know, and she hadn’t been in the industry that much longer.”

She knew enough, in fact, to start making her own wine. In 1987, toward the end of her tenure at Chappellet, she began to buy grapes and barrels and make her own cabernet sauvignon as a custom client in other people’s wineries. Her brand was launched.

On the last day of 1995, Corison and her husband William Martin closed a deal on a broken-down Victorian house and an old vineyard that had been on the market for eight years. Both were fixer-uppers. The Victorian needed a new foundation, new wiring, new plumbing and a coat of paint. And the vineyard needed a lot of TLC. This is where they built a barn in 1999 to serve as the winery.

Corison had been told the old rootstock was a variety susceptible to phylloxera, the vine-killing bug that nearly crushed Napa in the 1980s. But it turned out to be the phylloxera-resistant strain St. George. “We had bought this for bare-land prices,” she says. “It was a miracle.”

With those old, badass vines, Corison had a vineyard of her own at last. After more than a decade of making wines under her label with other people’s grapes in other people’s wineries, she could keep making the classic Napa cab she’d learned to make in the 1970s—lean, balanced and complex—with the fruit of her own Kronos Vineyard. In 2015, she and Martin added the nearby Sunbasket Vineyard to their estate.

From the start, Corison harvested grapes weeks before many other winemakers. These early grapes’ lower sugar levels result in wines of lower alcohol, because the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol. “The grapes come into the winery with complex flavors, tannins that feel like velvet, and snappy acidity,” she says. “In a good year, farmed right, I can have all the flavors good cabernet produces, from cherries to plum to cassis to blackberry. By picking early, I preserve that bright red and blue end of the flavor spectrum. With time in the bottle, this turns into the floral perfume I so value.”

Winemakers make use of scientific analysis, sending samples to labs to test for qualities such as total acidity, pH, alcohol and sugar levels and to check for microbiological stability once in barrels. Photography by Robert Durell

But that wasn’t what Napa was making by then. The moneymakers were sweet, juicy sugar bombs with 15% alcohol or more. Some people like those—no judgment. Well, OK, a little judgment. More seriously, that style might have been popular not for its own qualities, but because of the idiosyncratic recommendations of influential wine writers like Robert Parker. “In the ’90s, the Robert Parker era, Napa maybe took it too far,” says Jess Lander, wine reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. “Big, concentrated fruit bombs, lots of oak, lots of structure and tannin. That’s what made Napa famous, I would say.”

So by the early 2000s, things were tight for Corison Winery. Corison’s neighbors were building multimillion-dollar visitor centers and tasting rooms, hosting tour groups, selling swag. Napa was changing; Corison wasn’t. She thought she might have to sell.

“I’ve never met anybody so unwavering on their ideas,” Corallo-Titus says. “She stuck to a philosophy when maybe, at times, during the ’90s and 2000s, the industry was going in another direction.”

Maybe there’s a hint of critique in all the compliments about Corison’s unwavering faith. Either she’s as indomitable as her tough old vines or just too stubborn to survive in the modern Napa. She could have made wine that tasted like anything she wanted. Why not just make something people wanted to drink?

“All we have to sell is our integrity,” she says. “I just couldn’t make a wine I didn’t believe in.”

The thing about pendulums is that they swing back. “I’m hearing a lot of winemakers talk about acid and freshness and using less oak,” Lander says. “Cathy’s been doing that all along, and people are starting to realize that’s what they want to drink.”

What happened? Well, the sugar bombs of the 2000s aged poorly, Lander says. And wine criticism welcomed lots of new voices, especially on social media. Young, hip sommeliers started evangelizing Corison’s wine, too.

Cathy Corison ’75 and her husband built a new barn in 1999 to serve as the winery, which includes the large stainless steel tanks where fermentation occurs. Photography by Robert Durell

Corison herself isn’t sure what flipped the switch, but she definitely noticed. The New York Times started touting her in the 2010s. The Chronicle named her winemaker of the year in 2011. She got a couple of prestigious James Beard Award nominations. “That took 35 years,” Corison says. “It took 25 years for the business to be a going concern. It’s only been in the last 10 or 12 years we’ve been comfortable enough not to be terrified all the time.”

Napa might have changed again, but her wine hasn’t. The best answer to the question of how Corison turned things around comes while I sit across from her amid stacks of empty barrels, an array of quarter-full wine glasses on the table between us. Getting to taste wine with a winemaker is like visiting with an artist in their studio. She’s talking me through vintages from the 2010s forward, including a sip of the as-yet-unreleased 2020. That was a difficult year for Napa, when climate change-powered wildfires meant lots of vineyards’ grapes were tainted by smoke. Not Corison’s: Her earlier harvest meant she’d already brought in her grapes.

After starting her career at a time when women winemakers were still rare in Napa Valley, Cathy Corison ’75 was the San Francisco Chronicle’s winemaker of the year in 2011. Photography by Robert Durell

I also get a bit of her cabernet sauvignon from 1999, when the winery we’re sitting in was new. It’s extraordinary—the older wine is inky, with the same tart red-fruit-eau-de-vie lattice as the more recent bottles, but with an umami taste. And the ’20 has it too. It’s like time travel. What must have seemed like stubbornness tastes like continuity today. Corison’s wine is a big deal for the simple reason that it’s good.

It also, not incidentally, takes me back to the Napa reds my dad drank when I was a kid. I tell Corison this, and she smiles. That’s all she wants from her wine. “I want it to grace the table,” she says. “I want it to have a long and interesting life.” Take care of the grapes, and eventually they’ll take care of you.