- The Intention
- The Ingredients
- The Ritual
- The Diaspora Story
The queen of all roses, these sun-dried, rain-fed beauties are a deep magenta and smell heavenly. Beyond incredible florality, you'll taste notes of lychee, ripe nectarines, and earl grey tea. Organically grown by Parvathi Menon and her wonderful team on a 10-acre farm heaving with an abundance of bananas, limes, avocados, and rain-fed turmeric in northern Tamil Nadu, these Damask Rose (or Panneer Rose in Tamil) petals are regeneratively grown and tended to with a lot of love. Since the rose petals need to be processed everyday when they are perfectly in bloom, Parvathi designed an ingenious solar powered dehydration system that is just gentle enough to help the petals retain their deep coloring and lock in their renowned fragrance. They are delicious ground into coffee beans, atop desserts for a burst of pink, steeped in cream for a little floral joy, and infused in warm water for a rose tea that's heart-opening and soul-loving.
0.84oz
Panneer Rose Petals
The original intent of colonial conquest of the Indian subcontinent was a desire for domination of the spice trade. 400ish years later, as a young woman born and raised in postcolonial Mumbai, working at the intersection of food and culture, Sana Javeri Kadri was slowly discovering that not much about that system had changed. Farmers made no money, spices changed hands upwards of 10 times before reaching the consumer, and the final spice on your shelf was usually an old, dusty shadow of what it once was.
So in 2016, Sana booked a one way ticket home to Mumbai and signed herself up for 7 months of highly unpaid market research, 40+ farm visits, endless un-answered phone calls, a squishy motorbike ride through rice paddy, and one life-changing meeting with the good folks at the Indian Institute of Spices Research.
A lot of processing of doubts and fears later, 23 year old Sana founded Diaspora Co. in the fall of 2017 with just one spice - Pragati Turmeric - sourced from an equally young and idealistic farm partner - a now dear friend Mr. Prabhu Kasaraneni. But from their very first day, the big, audacious dream was to grow a radically new, decidedly delicious and truly equitable spice trade, to push a broken system into an equal exchange, and to have a lot of fun doing it.
Today, the Diaspora team sources 30 single-origin spices from 150 farms across India and Sri Lanka. They're proud to pay their farm partners an average of 6x above the commodity price. In a system where fair trade is a mere 15% premium, they pay what they believe to be a living wage - an investment in the kind of leadership and land stewardship that will build climate resilience and more delicious food systems.
The Intention
The queen of all roses, these sun-dried, rain-fed beauties are a deep magenta and smell heavenly. Beyond incredible florality, you'll taste notes of lychee, ripe nectarines, and earl grey tea. Organically grown by Parvathi Menon and her wonderful team on a 10-acre farm heaving with an abundance of bananas, limes, avocados, and rain-fed turmeric in northern Tamil Nadu, these Damask Rose (or Panneer Rose in Tamil) petals are regeneratively grown and tended to with a lot of love. Since the rose petals need to be processed everyday when they are perfectly in bloom, Parvathi designed an ingenious solar powered dehydration system that is just gentle enough to help the petals retain their deep coloring and lock in their renowned fragrance. They are delicious ground into coffee beans, atop desserts for a burst of pink, steeped in cream for a little floral joy, and infused in warm water for a rose tea that's heart-opening and soul-loving.
0.84oz
The Ingredients
Panneer Rose Petals
The Ritual
The Diaspora Story
The original intent of colonial conquest of the Indian subcontinent was a desire for domination of the spice trade. 400ish years later, as a young woman born and raised in postcolonial Mumbai, working at the intersection of food and culture, Sana Javeri Kadri was slowly discovering that not much about that system had changed. Farmers made no money, spices changed hands upwards of 10 times before reaching the consumer, and the final spice on your shelf was usually an old, dusty shadow of what it once was.
So in 2016, Sana booked a one way ticket home to Mumbai and signed herself up for 7 months of highly unpaid market research, 40+ farm visits, endless un-answered phone calls, a squishy motorbike ride through rice paddy, and one life-changing meeting with the good folks at the Indian Institute of Spices Research.
A lot of processing of doubts and fears later, 23 year old Sana founded Diaspora Co. in the fall of 2017 with just one spice - Pragati Turmeric - sourced from an equally young and idealistic farm partner - a now dear friend Mr. Prabhu Kasaraneni. But from their very first day, the big, audacious dream was to grow a radically new, decidedly delicious and truly equitable spice trade, to push a broken system into an equal exchange, and to have a lot of fun doing it.
Today, the Diaspora team sources 30 single-origin spices from 150 farms across India and Sri Lanka. They're proud to pay their farm partners an average of 6x above the commodity price. In a system where fair trade is a mere 15% premium, they pay what they believe to be a living wage - an investment in the kind of leadership and land stewardship that will build climate resilience and more delicious food systems.