S5 Ep14: How to Create an Enterprise Model That Bridges the Gap Between Farmers and Customers with Ori Zohar
“What was missing was the connection between the farmers to the customers.” — Ori Zohar
The centralized food system is broken and it needs to be fixed. In order to bridge the gap between farmers and customers, we need to create an enterprise model that allows the customer to buy produce directly from farmers. This is the only way to create a sustainable agricultural economy.
An enterprise allows farmers to sell their products more easily and at a higher price point because they are able to reach customers who are willing to pay more for their products.
Moreover, business owners will be able to provide customers with more information about the food they are eating, where it came from, how it was produced, and what is in it.
On the other hand, customers also benefit because they get fresh, local produce delivered directly from the farm. This also reduces food miles which is good for the environment. So, it's a win-win!
Burlap & Barrel partners with small, local farmers in order to support their livelihood and end inequality in the food system from its roots. This partnership has also allowed them to source out natural spices that are not available in the US as well as ensure that the products are all high-quality and taste great.
Learn more about the mission of Burlap & Barrel and how they're solving a major need in our food system as Justine interviews the company's co-founder, Ori Zohar. Justine and Ori also discuss why consumers care for good ingredients, how companies can help educate their consumers on what they're buying and how to buy them, how to create a better brand reputation, and Ori's secret spice that you might want to try.
Connect with Ori:
Ori is an experienced social entrepreneur and the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, where he leads the company's domestic operations, eCommerce and finances.
Ori's family moved to Baltimore, Maryland from Israel when he was 5 years old. He developed a love of all things food as a kid, learning to cook Middle Eastern and Mediterranean dishes from his parents. He firmly believes that tahini can improve most dishes.
Ori's entrepreneurial journey started in his teens, when he started a business (poorly) DJ'ing parties. Many other entrepreneurial initiatives followed. Ori first teamed up with Ethan to start Guerrilla Ice Cream, an activist ice cream cart that received a frenzy of media attention, in 2010.
A few years later, he co-founded Sindeo, a venture-backed mortgage company that provided home loans in an open and transparent way. Sindeo raised $32m, helped its customers secure more than $500m in home loans with record-setting customer satisfaction scores. Ori took the startup from idea through acquisition.
Ori's happy to be back in the food world, where eating is an integral part of his job.
Episode Highlights:
00:46 An Unpleasant Experience
05:24 Burlap and Barrel
12:23 Bridging the Gap Between Farmers and Customers
16:48 Being the Ultimate Source of Spices
20:44 Winning Over Great Chefs
26:07 Origin Blends
30:34 Ori's Secret Ingredient
Tweets:
A successful enterprise model must include a sustainable business model that creates value for the farmers and customers. Learn how to build a successful enterprise with @jreichman and Burlap & Barrel Co-Founder, Ori Zohar. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Burlap&Barrel #farmers #customers #greatspices #highqualityingredients #imported #businessbuilding #ecommerse #enterprise
Inspirational Quotes:
06:22 "For most people, spices are a mystery. We're changing that. We're paying the farmers a lot more. Because then, we get fresh, high quality spices. And it'll be the best spice you've ever tasted!" -Oru Zohar
13:33 "What was missing was the connection between the farmers to the customers." -Ori Zohar
14:59 "There are incredible stories that connect us to what makes this space really special, but can only be done with a direct trade social enterprise model." -Ori Zohar
18:11 "There's a lot of storytelling, a lot of education, and information so that people can learn and then make a choice about what they're buying and where they're buying it from." -Justine Reichman
25:56 "We're trying to make our site a fun place where there's always cool unexpected things and new flavors for you to cook with." -Ori Zohar
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Hello, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. Today with me is Ori Zohar, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Burlap & Barrel.
Welcome, Ori.
Ori Zohar: Hey, great to be here.
Justine Reichman: Great to re-meet you. Great to have you here. Last time we met, you were here in San Francisco. Now, you're in my hometown, New York. A little nostalgic.
Ori Zohar: Yeah. Meeting all the bagels and lox, and pizza slices that I can get while I'm here.
Justine Reichman: I have to say that when I first came here eight years, seven and a half years ago, I came to visit Tim. And one day, I decided that I didn't even really eat bagels, but I decided that I really want a bagel and some cream cheese. And I got in the car and went to the shopping center to go get a bagel and nova. And I walked into the shop and said to the person, can I have a bagel with some nova, a little bit of cream cheese. The woman's like, what's nova? What do you mean? Oh, that's nova. I said, what do you sell? She goes, we have salmon. I said, well, one is salty, and one is not. What are you talking about? I'm like, well, where's your fish? Where do you keep your fish? And she goes, it's right there in packages. I'm like, do you slice it? How do you slice it? Because like I said, what are you talking about?
Ori Zohar: God's work over there educating Californians on all the right ways to do bagel rock.
Justine Reichman: It's a skill. You have to slice it properly. It comes out really lovely and thin. She looked at me like I was crazy. And I walked out of there without a bagel, without nova, without anything. I was just like, this was not a good experience. So it's seven years later, and this year for Rosh Hashanna. My dad was coming up from LA. He lives in New York and LA. I won't bore you too long with my story.
Ori Zohar: Geography. You have to do the beginning anytime when you Jewish people are talking.
Justine Reichman: So actually, it wasn't Rosh Hashanna. I was like, how can I help my father here for the Jewish holidays? And yes, I can make noodle pudding, and I can make all the other things. But where are we going to get the bagels, lox, and the cream cheese. So I had to call New York. I had to have gone gold belly, everything from New York. I had to order my nova. I had to order, he likes herring, which I'm not a huge fan of herring, to be honest. But I ordered it all from New York. So it was supposed to arrive the day before. And then I added to my order, I wanted some chicken soup, and I wanted this, and then they screwed up the orders. So this soup, and this ordered, and the rest wasn't coming till 8:00 o'clock.Like breakfast. We're gonna die of hunger here. So FedEx was supposed to arrive with our food., and it's like noon. I'm like, where's my food? Where's my food? And Bonnie, my assistant was calling and trying to find out that like, it's in Oakland, it's here it's there. It's an artifact truck. I went to FedEx four times. By the way, it was my birthday and so I'm getting other FedEx- like birthday packages. I kept going into like, hi, did my box come? Like, no, we've got a box of meat for somebody, but no box of fish.
Ori Zohar: Yeah, yeah, you know what? I have to mention their track record, I often, whenever I have gifts for people that, like they're having a baby, a birthday, or whatever, they'll get a nice package from Russ & Daughters from me, and they'll do it right. But one time I attend, something happens. The driver delivering gets in a car accident, the thing, whatever. But in general, it's a pretty nice package to receive so I'm sad it didn't work out for--
Justine Reichman: Hold on. It did at the end. I felt 1:30, they're like, go stand at the gate. Don't let the FedEx truck. We're gonna leave, we're gonna go in the back, we're gonna go get your box. They came out with my big gulf belly from Russ & Daughters, and I got all my food. Okay, I just had to go to the (inaudible) about five times.
Ori Zohar: Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Justine Reichman: So you have to order all your Jewish food from home from New York. Have you been with God help since two years?
Ori Zohar: I know Emily. I know Boy Chick. She's doing amazing work. New York, San Francisco a proper bagel scene. It's great. It fills my heart.
Justine Reichman: I know. And she learned that, she had tours in H&H bagel and the whole thing. And I loved it. I was so inspired when I heard her story.
Ori Zohar: Her bagels are amazing. She is okay.
Justine Reichman: So let's talk about you. Let's talk about spices. Let's learn a little bit more about the whole Jewish geography, the spices and the lox in the Bay Area. But what's been coming down the pipeline, so already talked to us about Burlap & Barrel. For those listening that are not familiar with Burlap & Barrel, what is Burlap & Barrel?
"For most people, spices are a mystery. We're changing that. We're paying the farmers a lot more. Because then, we get fresh, high quality spices. And it'll be the best spice you've ever tasted!" -Oru Zohar
Ori Zohar: So Burlap & Barrel is a social enterprise. We're a spice company that we work directly with smallholder farmers, we work to kind of set them up to be their own direct exporters. Normally in the spice industry, spices change hands so many times, good and bad batches get mixed together. Literally years passed between the farm when it got to your supermarket. And we said, let's cut through all this. So we're working directly with the farmers, we're setting up as their own direct exporter. And what's also really nice about that is that, normally, farmers are just growing the spices. But we're working with these really impressive, incredible entrepreneurial farmers to also dry and clean, and sort, and grind, and package the spices. So for example, the fairtrade price for turmeric in India is around $1 a kilogram, which is still really hard to live off of. And so we pay between four and five bucks a kilogram at origin for that. So we're trying to do a new model. We know where our coffee, tea and chocolate comes from. We go to farmers markets, we know where our produce and meat comes from. But for most people, spices are a mystery. We're changing tha. We're cutting through all that stuff. We're paying the farmers a lot more. Because then, we get really fresh, really high quality spices. And it'll be the best spices you've ever tasted, I promise.
Justine Reichman: What inspired you to come up with this idea?
Ori Zohar: So we started, me and my Co-Founder Ethan. Ethan is Co-Founder, Co-CEO. We really have his business running as a partnership. He and I have been friends for a long time, a little over 15 years ago. He was working as a chef in New York. I was sitting wherever he was cooking and just eating. That was the nature of our relationship. We became friends like that. And after a while, some of the restaurants that he's been working at eventually closed down, and we decided to start an ice cream business together. We just didn't know what. We said, let's do something. He had been the pastry chef, he was making a lot of ice cream. He was talking to all his friends about saying, hey, I want to maybe do something with ice cream in a car and we'll push it around. There was a talk with our business friend. I had a background in business, in marketing and all that stuff. Everyone else told him he was crazy. I said, that sounds amazing. Let's do it.
And in the summer of 2010, to date myself, we started an ice cream cart called Gorilla Ice Cream, which was an activist ice cream cart flavors inspired. We donate our profits to charity, a good street vending project. And it was a fun and crazy summer. And then the seasons changed. Ethan had actually gone and gotten accepted into a master's in international development, and I went to the dentist. He was like, what have you done? You have three cavities. And so I realized that that school was not for me. I couldn't be trusted. Because you're looking at the cart and you're just kind of eating ice cream all day long. I don't know. But through that time, I actually ended up moving to San Francisco. For about seven years, I started a mortgage company because I'm the business side of the business of entrepreneurship. There's different kinds of entrepreneurs, inventors, and subject matter experts. And the business people in business is always the area where I liked and was good at, and was interesting to me. And I'd met some folks I wanted to invest in a company that would help make the process of getting a mortgage easier. It would make it, who knows what an APR is, who knows when to get points, what they are, what it even means. It's so complicated. Nobody knows what they're doing so I started a company called Syndeo to get that started and spent four years building it up to raise $32 million, and had over 100 employees. And over that course of time, we were just doing that high growth, high burn rate thing.
Justine Reichman: Just say that you make it sound like a no big deal. Like you just wake up in the morning, I'm gonna raise $32 million, you're gonna make a milkshake or juice.
Ori Zohar: You know what? It was hard, crazy and intense. We were like just any investor that would talk to us. We were pitching like our lives depended on it, and we were just working hard. One of the really beautiful things about the Bay Area is that there's such a concentration of knowledge around entrepreneurship, and fundraising, and all that stuff that I could just call 5 or 10 different people and they would know somebody to connect to me and all that. And that was really wonderful. But in the end, we ended up trying to raise our Series C and had an investor on the line and learned that they were just investing in bad faith. They didn't want to give us the money. They were waiting for us to go bankrupt, and they wanted to buy us out of bankruptcy. And we said, oh, no. Cut the team from 100 plus people to eight people and look for an investor, anything. One of our investors ended up buying the company, and we had an exit. But I call it an emergency exit.
I was like, I gotta just relax. I gotta like, it's been four years of insanity of barely making payroll every month.We were just like, we gotta do something different. So I was hoping to get a really cushy kind of job at a big corporation. I convinced the big telecom company to set up an entrepreneur and residence program and hire me. I convinced him to set up an entrepreneurship and residence program, but they hired somebody else. So I almost got there. But in the meantime, Ethan went and got his master's, his master's in international development finished. He then moved and began his work as an aid worker in Afghanistan of all places with the Aga Khan Foundation, working on bridges, roads and schools, all kinds of projects that deployed aid there. And we need to come back. He had brought back all kinds of his favorite foods as you do. We all travel and bring back our favorite things. He brought back dried nuts and dried fruit, and also this wild cumin from northern Afghanistan. And its chef buddies were like, oh, my God, this cumin is incredible. We've never had cumin like this. We'll buy it from you, bring it back. And he said, huh? And he said, oh, yeah, I'm coming to San Francisco. I'm gonna show you something. And by the time he made it back to San Francisco, he had brought back, also he had connected with a cooperative of organic farmers in Zanzibar growing peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon. Connected with a vertically integrated organic farmer in Guatemala that was growing cardamom among other things.
Justine Reichman: One of my favorites.
Ori Zohar: Well, okay, so we got the staples there. And actually, Guatemala's a really interesting story for cardamom. I won't go on for too long, but India grew more carbon than any other country. But they don't export it. They export very little cardamom because it's for local consumption. So in the early 1900's, some German farmers growing coffee in Guatemala said, I wonder what else would grow here? And they planted cardamom, and it just took off. And so cardamom became a massive crop in Guatemala. And now, Guatemala is the largest exporter of cardamom in the world. And it's one of the very rare countries where they don't cook with it. They don't like the flavor, they don't use it. It's these crazy other crops that they know a lot of people around the world like, but it just doesn't suit their palate. Every time we go to Guatemala, we're trying, we talked to the farmers, what do you do with it? Try it in your coffee, try it in your rice, try it here. And they're like, no, I don't like it. And so we're trying one one farmer at a time to get them to like cardamom.
Justine Reichman: So when you were talking before, you talked about this as a social enterprise? You created a social enterprise. So you found all this, you found all these wonderful herbs, and spices. So how did you go from finding these spices to then being inspiring to create a social enterprise?
"What was missing was the connection between the farmers to the customers." -Ori Zohar
Ori Zohar: So what we realized early on, so we always wanted to do a business that kind of using for profit, approach for good.We felt like we wanted to blend something in between for profit and nonprofit.We wanted to be able to sell a product, we wanted to sell it at the market value, and we wanted to use that money to kind of redistribute wealth. We wanted to just make sure that the farmers got a much larger slice of the pie instead of all these intermediaries, or instead of this extractive economics that for profits often are kind of built on top of. So we want to do something that would help us grow our business, but ultimately put a lot more money in the farmers pockets without us telling them how to spend it or where to spend it. That's not our business. And so what we realize is that if we can work with the farmers, and if we can help them get set up as direct exporters, there's a bunch of these farmers that are growing really incredible spices and the commodity market doesn't care about it. They're paying the same price for good, bad, big, small this way, that way. They just have their quotas just pushing volumes through, everybody gets the same price. And we knew that in the US, people really cared about getting better ingredients, whether it was in making their food, or when they brought to restaurants, or the wine they were drinking. And so we saw that there was an opportunity to make the connection here. What was missing was the connection between the farmers to the customers. And we said, let's build a company that does that.
"There are incredible stories that connect us to what makes this space really special, but can only be done with a direct trade social enterprise model." -Ori Zohar
So it's not like we get good spices. And also, we pay the farmers more. So we get good spices because we pay the farmers more because we were actually with the FDA, because we help them become their own direct exporters and do much more of this kind of value added processing. And that's maybe regenerative farming, that's organic farming. Maybe that's grinding, and blending, and cleaning, and all this stuff, and sorting. And so all these things are things that normally some intermediary would get paid for, and it's fine. Those intermediates are adding some value. But what they're also doing is they're mixing good and bad. And they're mixing old lots with new lots. And anyway, the farmer that's taking all this risk of actually planting the land and owning it, and spending all this time growing the spices, they end up getting a really small percentage of the value. So realize that there was a really nice overlap between what the farmers were doing, these incredible farms were doing, there just wasn't a market for it. And then the same way, people in the US were really excited about these new spices that had really been treated as commodities, like what is cinnamon brown powder? That's the extent that most people know about it.When we say, come with us back to the mountains of Vietnam and Quang Nam where they grow the royal cinnamon, and it's a tree bark. And these trees are often grown for 20 plus years where it's literally like a savings account where a parent will plant a tree for the child to harvest, and the longer the child can wait, the more valuable the bark is. There are always really incredible stories that really connect us to what makes this space really special, but can only be done with a direct trade social enterprise model. And so that's what we built.
Justine Reichman: Wow. That's amazing. That's amazing. And when you communicate this to the people, what do you see? What do you feel from the community? What's the response?
Ori Zohar: Well, what we found is that people really care. We thought we were worried initially that it would be something that chefs would care about. But we were worried that like home cooks may say, hey, I don't know, I'm intimidated and overwhelmed, whatever. But it turns out that home cooks really have become our best customers. 80% of our business right now is from home cooks, and we couldn't be happier. The pandemic really accelerated that because everybody got stuck at home, and everybody was cooking more. And grocery store supply chains were all broken so people were just Googling the best spices, where would I get cinnamon from? And all that stuff. And a lot of people stumbled across Burlap & Barrel, our company, and came in. What's been really fun is that people we found are really curious. When we start talking about, where do your peppercorns come from? People are like, wait a second. I actually have no idea. I cook with this every day. It's on my table every time I eat, but what is peppercorn? We start saying, well, come with us. We'll show you. It's the fruit of a climbing vine, and they grow in bunches like grapes. And here's a photo of how they grow in Vietnam. And here's how it's a little different on how they grow in Zanzibar. And here's the difference in the flavors between them. Come with us to Indonesia where they ferment the peppercorns and you get these funky white fermented peppercorns that almost tastes like a funky cheese. And so we find that kind of opens people's eyes, and it gets them really excited about a part of their kitchen that they really hadn't thought that much about before, that they were just used to buying from a giant wall of alphabetized spices. And then now, that was all they had ever thought about.
Justine Reichman: So how do you show people? Is this through video?
"There's a lot of storytelling, a lot of education, and information so that people can learn and then make a choice about what they're buying and where they're buying it from." -Justine Reichman
Ori Zohar: So this is where it's really fun to be an E commerce company because we're online.We have unlimited shelf space, we have so many photos. We have room for stories where each of our spice pages, you can see the spice, the flavor notes, where we get it from, how it was harvested, when it was harvested. Photos of the seedlings. We really want to build burlapandbarrel.com as really the ultimate source of spices. Because even as we were looking to learn more about spices, we found that it was so hard to learn about spices online. Often the best way that we could learn was to just go to the farms, just sit with the farmers and spend a few days there. They would talk to us and tell us what they grow. And when they grow, how they harvest and why they harvest that time. And all the nuances between older and younger spices and different varieties. And it was just a wealth of knowledge so that's what we're trying to do is share that same knowledge that the farmers have and say things like, why is this spice so good? Come with us back to the farms and back to the fields and we'll show you exactly where it comes from. When you're at a grocery store, you don't get that in your jar. You have like a little package, and you have a little fun telling as much of that as you can. And it's really hard. But on our site, we have a ton of space. And if you want to, you don't have to redo the whole story. If you don't want to, just have a real cinnamon. It'll change what you think is cinnamon, we promise. But if you want to, you can also dig further, learn about the story and see where it comes from.
Justine Reichman: Wow. Sounds like there's a lot of storytelling, a lot of education and information so that people can really learn and then make a choice about what they're buying and where they're buying it from.
Ori Zohar: Yeah. It seems like Americans are a little bit intimidated by cooking with spices. It seems like Americans like to have our salt and pepper. I was born in Israel, I grew up with things like sumac, and aleppo pepper, and urfa chili, and all kinds of cumin, and all kinds of other spices like that as well as day to day spices too. But what we found is that everyone talks a lot about food, TikTok, and Gen Z. And what they're doing in TikTok challenges, you know who are saving grace, our best, best, best online customers are women in their 50's and 60's that live outside of major cities. We look at all the emails. We email all of our customers to just say how they found us. And what we found out is that there's this incredible group of home cooks, they have a few decades of cooking experience, they love to cook, they cook three square meals a day and they're not near like big cities where maybe there's a lot of specialty stores. So you can walk into 10 different places. You have to drive, you're like, forget it. I'm just going to order online. And they're the best, best customers. I've talked to so many companies that have launched new food products online and all of them say, these older ladies, we love them. They're the best customers. Forget all the millennials and Gen Z.
Justine Reichman: So when you were building this company, because you built it before the pandemic, you started the pandemic, what was your original plan?
Ori Zohar: So we launched the company in late 2016. And early on, we wanted to sell to home cooks, but we knew it was expensive. So a lot of advertising and all of that stuff. We said, let's start with what we know. And my Co-Founder Ethan was working as a chef. So he really went door to door and just knocked on doors, saw who would spend time with him, would be there in between the lunch and dinner rush. When the chef's busy, we'll just open his backpack and share the spices. And in 2018, about 50% of our sales came from incredible chefs and restaurants. And by the way, we still do. We still sell at Madison Park in Momofuku, Dig Inn, and Sweetgreen and all that. We still have chefs that are really excited about our spices.
Justine Reichman: For those listening that are not from the New York area, because those are all really great. He's named restaurants, everything from the accessible sort of grabbing go to the top restaurants. So you really have a big swing.
Ori Zohar: I think that it just goes to the point that most, even companies that are being really thoughtful about where their spices come from are often just buying from maybe smaller importers rather than the larger importers. What we're doing is different, and there's a handful of other companies like us that are also now doing this direct trade, that they're responsible for the spices from the farm all the way to your kitchen. So there's just one single thread going in that whole way, and that's the kind of new generation and the new way. And whenever people ask me, how do I know where my spices are? (inaudible) from buying good spices. It's really bad. Can the company tell you where they come from? When they were harvested, was there a connection there? Or were they just bought from an intermediary along the supply chain, and then maybe they're good, maybe they're not, maybe it did come from this farm, or maybe it came from a thousand others. So really, this connection back to the farmer is really, really important and making sure that you're getting really fresh, really high quality spices. But we started with chefs. And really, that was it. We also knew that chefs would be able to just smell and taste. And if we could win them over, then that was a really important thing. And so we were able to win over a lot of incredible chefs and a lot of incredible restaurants.
Justine Reichman: So you started back with the chef's, and then COVID hit. So how did that impact your business? What was your biggest surprise?
Ori Zohar: So in COVID, if you can imagine, we're a pretty young business. Still half of our revenue is coming from professional restaurants, from chefs at professional restaurants. And in the meantime, I was in San Francisco. I decided on February 29 of 2020, Ethan and I were going to do a sourcing trip to India. I packed all my stuff up, I had shipped it to storage and just said that this is a good excuse to just move back to New York. And so I ended up flying to India and met Ethan there. And a few days later, India went from, we don't have COVID. We have COVID and foreigners brought it in. They started revoking visas and closing down entire states to foreigners. And we said, this is not the time to do our expansive India sourcing trip. We were so excited for it, but we said, well, we have to head back.
And by the time we landed in New York, neither of us had a sense of smell. Both have a fever, fatigue and all that stuff. And nobody knew at that point. We were still figuring out what COVID was, the symptoms and all that stuff. But we stayed home. And luckily, we got better. And then try to look at what was left of our business. And what was left is that the 50% of our sales that had come from restaurants had gone to 0% just because all the restaurants were reeling and closed, and nobody was serving food in that way anymore. I was trying to figure it out. We looked long and hard and started doing what we call disaster planning, which is like worst comes to worst. What do we do? How long can we pay our salaries? How long can we keep running? What happens if our packing facility closes? What happens if our warehouse closes and it bums you out? And we were just kind of planning to just pack it up until things got better. And then something magical happened. But home cooks came out of the woodwork. And by May, we made up for the sales that we had lost from the restaurants and home cooks. And by the end of the year, we grew five X.
"We're trying to make our site a fun place where there's always cool unexpected things and new flavors for you to cook with." -Ori Zohar
So you can imagine that you went from like, oh, my god, are we going to run out of business to, oh, my god, we're going to run out of spices. And we started putting all the spices we could on airplanes instead of boats. We started repacking our food service containers that we sold to restaurants into small retail jars, and we just started importing spices from the US. So there was actually a group of seasonal workers from Jamaica that were working in upstate New York on a Maple Farm helping to tap maple trees, birch trees and all that stuff. And the owner reached out to us and said, listen, I got some seasonal workers here and they can't go back. Can we do something together? And they started picking wild ramp leaves for us. And so we started trucking these wild ramps. And for those who don't know ramps, they're an ally of a relative of onions and shallots that grow only wild in a very short period of early spring. They're one of the first things to pop up and to show up in the Farmers Market's on the East Coast. And people go wild for them because it's kind of like at the end of the winter when we only have carrots and potatoes at the Farmers Market for like 6 months. And so everyone gets really excited, but they pick these ramps, we bring them to our packing facility, we dehydrate them, we break them up and we pack these wild ramps the first time we'd ever seen it.
So we launched these ramps. And so we just started doing all kinds of domestic spices. And now, we bring in chilies from California, and salt from Syracuse, New York, and all kinds of other fun things. We had no idea all these spices were growing in America. But that was one of the pandemic things that we had figured out. Because we could put them on a truck, and they could arrive here a few days later. And we didn't have to wait for a boat to dock from some other place in the country, some other country in the world. And so the pandemic really changed our business, and we started growing. And then in 2021, we launched a lot of new spices, and we filled up our lineup and all that. And now in 2022, we're still going strong and pushing. Trying to just convince people that maybe, sure, you can go back to your grocery store, and maybe they did restock. They're like 8 foot wide spice aisle, but you're gonna get much better stuff coming to us. Plus, we have signed cookbooks from authors. We have all kinds of cool collaboration, spice jam, spice honey, spice granolas. We're trying to make our site like fun, fun place where there's always cool unexpected things and new flavors for you to cook with.
Justine Reichman: That's amazing. So what's new and next for you on the horizon?
Ori Zohar: So what we've been doing is we figured out that, we got a lot of requests from people about spice blends and they said, great, they have all these spices, but I want you to blend them together. For me, it's a blend that I know so that I can just sprinkle it on my food and cook with it. And we said, let's think about that. And what we found is that we could work with some farmers that actually grow a bunch of different spices and get them to blend it themselves based on their origin recipe, their own proprietary, homegrown, traditional recipe. And so we call these origin blends. And it actually works really well with our mission. Because what we're able to do is leave more value at origin because we're saying that we're not just asking you to grow the spices, dry them and grind them. We're also going to pay you to blend them too. And so what we brought in the first one was that, oh, is an origin (inaudible) that was grown in Palestine? And as an Israeli having grown up with this was the best I've ever had in my life. No comparison.
Justine Reichman: I want some.
Ori Zohar: Yeah, no problem. And now, we brought in this Kofte Baharat, which is his kind of traditional Turkish meat blend that they put on kebabs and all kinds of things like that. Kind of wants to taste like meat, so I use them on veggie blends and all that stuff. And very soon, I'm not allowed to say this, but we'll say it here. We're gonna launch a five spice from Vietnam, which is a really incredible Vietnamese five spice similar to the Chinese one. Just a Vietnamese spin on it with star anise, cinnamon and ginger. And a couple, they actually have nine spices in there, five spices, which is fun. We really try to keep sugar and salt out of our spices unless the recipe calls for it.
Justine Reichman: That's the one challenge I find when I look at some of these spices. Not with Burlap & Barrel, but in general. When I look at some of the mixed spices, when you're at a Farmers Market or you're at a store and I look like, why does it have to have sugar in it?
Ori Zohar: Totally. Even like Montreal steak seasoning and chicken adobo. Two best selling things? Number one, salt. Number two, garlic. They're basically salted garlic sauce with some other stuff. So we're working on building up the business, and we're also now starting to work on some single origin sugars. We don't have it nailed down quite yet, but we think sugars come from plants. They're growing, they're harvested, so we're going to bring in some maple sugar, and some cane sugar, and some coconut sugar. And so we just think that there's a good opportunity to also trace your sugars back to origin. And as a result, get a much flavorful, more interesting version of that, I guess spice in our world.
Justine Reichman: Do you have gift boxes? Because I feel like a gift box, I think I kind of want, yeah, I want that. I want that. I want that.
Ori Zohar: So the most stressful time for our business, Thanksgiving in New Year's, I feel like that's the super bowl for food because everybody's cooking, but also because everybody's gifting and sending it. So we pack our spice. We have three pack and six pack gift boxes. Actually, a lot. I recently did something like 10% of our orders are gifts to other people, and people got the memo sending it around.
Justine Reichman: It was natural. I was like, this is a great gift to give somebody.
Ori Zohar: I personally like to give consumable gifts. Because every time you give somebody an object, I feel stressed that they feel like they need to use it, and they need to show me. Just give them something, they will say great, we love it, we use it. Plus best case scenario, they'll have you over for dinner and you'll kind of enjoy what you give them.
Justine Reichman: Well, it sounds amazing. I love the story behind it. I'm curious about so many things, and I want to go online now and learn about all the different stories behind all these different spices and herbs. There's about a half a dozen. I'm so glad that we were able to reconnect and have you on Essential Ingredients and learn all about this. If people wanted to go on and learn about the spices and buy the spices, what's the best way to check it out?
Ori Zohar: We're called Burlap & Barrel, and you can check us out at burlapandbarrel.com. It's hard to choose a word with a lot of R's and L's in it. My Israeli parents can just barely get through it. But that's B-U-R-L-A-P-A-N-D-B-A-R-R-E-L .com. Or check us on our Instagram, @burlapandbarrel. That's where we post all of our kind of sourcing trip photos, so feel free to follow along and kind of learn a little bit more about where your spices come from.
Justine Reichman: And before we go, I'm curious, do you have a favorite?
Ori Zohar: Right now, the spice that I've been using on everything is sun dried tomato powder. We worked with our partner farmers in Turkey, it's just like umami blast. I even put it on fresh cut tomatoes out of season just to make them a little more tomato. But that's been such a fun secret ingredient that I've been using on just about everything.
Justine Reichman: Okay, so folks, you heard it. That's his one. I'm going to take his recommendation because he's tried them all. So anyway, alright, thank you so much for joining us. I want to thank our guests for tuning in. We're here every week, so please don't forget to download, subscribe, rate and review. We want to hear from you. Oh, that rhymes. Anyway, thanks so much for joining us.
Ori Zohar: Thank you.
