Sana Javeri Kadri
A place at the table.
For Diaspora Co.’s founder, a spice business begins with the pleasures of home—and reaches back to the people who grow what goes into it.
Sana Javeri Kadri used to read cookbooks in bed. In a 2021 interview from her Oakland cottage, the founder of Diaspora Co. described the books as a favorite indulgence: company for a quiet evening, inspiration for the one or two meals she cooked most days. Away from the stove, there were dog walks, Korean dramas and fiction. Food was her business, but it was also how she made a home.
The photographs from that period show saturated color, crowded shelves and a yellow sofa. Growing up in Mumbai with architect parents had given her an appetite for design as well as flavor. Her childhood home looked toward the Arabian Sea. The California cottage was a different setting, carrying the same instinct to surround herself with things she wanted to live with.
That connection between a room, a meal and belonging runs deeper than the brand. Recalling her upbringing to Forbes in 2025, Javeri Kadri described Sunday lunches that gathered a family whose roots crossed regions, religions and the India–Pakistan border. Food gave that extended family a language in common. Her father’s insistence that a fortunate life carried obligations to others also stayed with her. The company would eventually become a way of working through both inheritances.
Diaspora began with a return journey. In 2016, Javeri Kadri went back to India to investigate the spice trade, spending seven months researching and visiting farms. In fall 2017, at 23, she launched with one product: Pragati Turmeric, grown by Prabhu Kasaraneni. The company’s own account places that first relationship at the center of its history. Before the colorful tins and widening assortment, there was a grower and a crop. The deliberately narrow beginning gave her something concrete to sell and explain. Turmeric was an everyday ingredient with an identifiable origin, offering a direct connection between a home cook’s purchase and the work of one farming family.
Her commercial proposition was that the person producing an exceptional ingredient deserved a better place in the transaction. In an interview with Other People’s Pockets, she explained that the starting point was a viable price for the farmer; the business then had to build its economics around that cost. It reverses the familiar conversation in which a buyer announces the price and expects a supplier to make it work.
The educational work is just as practical. A shopper may know coriander as a powder without thinking about its seed, or saffron without picturing the flower. Diaspora’s storytelling restores those connections. Identifying plants, places and growers makes the contents of a kitchen cupboard less anonymous. For a company selling something consumed a spoonful at a time, teaching people to recognize the ingredient is part of building demand.
By July 2025, she described annual revenue to Fortune as being in the “mid-millions.” The sums flowing toward farms offer another measure: she told Forbes in August 2025 that Diaspora had paid its farming partners almost $3 million to that point. That was a cumulative company figure, not her personal wealth. It put a dollar amount behind an ambition often expressed in the language of equity.
Those commitments still have to survive an importer’s balance sheet. In October 2025, The San Francisco Standard reported that Diaspora had paid $250,000 in tariffs, wiping out the profit Javeri Kadri had expected for the year. The business had 26 employees, 18 in India, and had raised prices that fall. Those are figures from that moment, but the pressure they describe is enduring: a mission does not remove the need for cash.
By March 2026, she told On Hand that the company worked with about 140 farms, sold through roughly 600 stores and had around 160,000 customers. Her next project brought the story back to the kitchen. Written with recipe editor Asha Loupy, The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook collected 85 recipes after extensive visits to farming families in India and Sri Lanka.
The two authors described adapting what they learned for the appliances and ingredients their readers actually had. The recipes did not require customers to buy Diaspora spices. That distinction matters: the book asks people to cook, experiment and use what is in the jar. For the founder who once read cookbooks in bed, making one became another way to bring distant kitchens into the same conversation.