Social Impact

A Letter from the Co-Founders

2022 was a year of balancing sustainable growth and catching our breath as a company. We partnered with new farmers, deepened our long-term relationships with existing partner farmers and broadened our impact at home. We introduced more than 50 new products, including iconic spice blends produced at origin, single origin sugars and unique collaborations with food companies that we admire. We saw things slow down from the intensity and urgency of 2020 and 2021, which was a welcome change of pace.

In 2022, we put $422,059 into the pockets of highly skilled, entrepreneurial farmers around the world. They are committed to growing culturally significant and absolutely delicious spices primarily through organic and regenerative farming methods, and our businesses continue to grow together.

Conscientiously growing our business increases our social impact. The more spices we sell, the more spices we can buy from our partner farmers, improving their livelihoods — these long-standing relationships are the basis of our business, and we work together on planning so we can be more resilient in the face of supply-and-demand changes.

Since we launched our company in 2016, almost all of our partner farmers have significantly increased their spice production, expanded to new spices and other crops, managed value-added processes like sorting, grinding, chopping, curing, fermenting and blending, and built more powerful and resilient businesses. We have grown right alongside them, supporting their growth through purchasing commitments and meaningful down payments, and getting the word out about single origin spices.

Our spices taste incredible because of our partner farmers' expertise and care, and we are honored to support their work on an even larger scale in 2023.

Ori and Ethan
Burlap & Barrel Co-founders & Co-CEOS

Written by: Bayley Freeman, Operations & Communications Manager
Alyssa Melendez, Operations & Supply Chain Manager

Impact at Origin

Farming Practices

Organic Farming

• Long-term farmer & consumer health
• Lower yield, higher quality

Regenerative Farming

• Environmental health & carbon sequestration
• Long-term farm productivity

Wild Harvesting

• Incentivizes natural habitat protection
• High-value varietals provide supplemental income

Post-Harvest Practices, Value-Added Practices at Origin  

Drying

Cleaning

Grinding

Blending

We regularly check in with our partner farmers during in-person farm visits and video calls. In 2022, we personally visited our partner farms in Hungary, Guatemala, Colombia, France, Vietnam and Vermont. Visiting with our partner farmers is crucial to maintaining long-term relationships and growing our businesses together, and the time we spend together deepens our mutual understanding of the market on both sides.

In 2022, we introduced four Origin Blends, a new line of iconic spice blends produced at origin by our partners, keeping the value of blend development and blending at origin. We sold over 10,000 jars of origin blends, bringing our customers the absolute highest quality spice blends, made by spice-blending experts according to traditional recipes.

We asked some of our long-standing partner farmers to talk about our relationships and how we’ve grown our businesses together over the years, and here’s what they had to say:

Long-Term Farmer Partnerships 

Our business is built on long-term relationships with our partner farmers. We work collaboratively to grow our businesses together.

Here’s how:

Farmer-led Pricing

We ask our partner farmers to set prices for their spices. 

Purchase Commitments & Down Payments

We make purchase commitments and significant advance payments.

Long-Term Relationships

We work with our partner farmers to plan for changing volumes year over year, so they can forecast and plan, increasing their businesses’ resiliency to supply-and-demand challenges.

2022 By the Numbers 

In 2022, we rebalanced our inventory. With so much supply chain turbulence in 2020 and 2021, we had placed bigger orders with our partner farmers to get more money in their hands and to create a buffer for uncertain harvesting, processing, and transit conditions.

We saw this uncertainty stabilize in 2022, and we worked with our partner farmers to purchase just what we needed at the peak harvest times.

In that time, we passed some big milestones: over $2.1 million paid to our partner farmers since the beginning of our business for over 460,000 lbs. Our Origin Blends also helped us increase the average price per pound paid to our partner farmers.

Sourced 20 spices 

Including 4 origin blends

Paid $422,059 to partner farmers 

Sourced 86,063 pounds of spices 

2022 Sourcing by Country 

Environmental Impact

Finally, we’ve been laying a lot of the groundwork to significantly reduce our carbon footprint.

We added a second warehouse on the West coast to significantly increase the use of ground shipping (in lieu of air freight), reducing single parcel transit distance.

We also transitioned our PET container labels to an APR-approved Clean Flake label substrate that allows the labels to be removed from the containers more easily during the PET recycling process, helping to improve PCR quality.

You may have noticed more of your packages coming in pouches rather than boxes — that’s to reduce the weight and size of the orders for more efficient shipping.

2022 Impact at Home 

In 2022, we also made meaningful impacts at home.

We launched three collaboration spice blends with the non-profit God’s Love We Deliver, and we donated $11,000 of the proceeds from the sales of the blends to their charity. We also supplied the organization with discounted spices for the kitchen, where they make and deliver nutritious, medically tailored meals to people too sick to shop or cook for themselves.

We introduced Smoke ‘N’ Herb, a heady collaboration blend with Ghetto Gastro, and we donated $1 from each jar sold to organizations that support criminal justice reform and cannabis justice.

We continued our donations to charities from sales of our Floyd Cardoz Legacy Masalas, made in partnership with Barkha Cardoz. Since the launch we’ve sold over 45,000 jars of masalas, which means we donated more than $45,000 on behalf of Floyd and Barkha Cardoz to charities they support, included Cookies for Kids Cancer, South Asian Council for Social Services, TYCIA Foundation, 360 Plus Foundation, Kolba, NJAAF and The Desai Foundation.

We continued our Guerrilla Ice Cream initiative, a pro-bono advising and consulting project for early-stage entrepreneurs of color and from other historically-excluded backgrounds to help with their sourcing, supply chains, pricing, marketing and strategy.

We honored every one of the requests to utilize our Pay What You Can program, which assists customers who need reduced pricing on our spices (no questions asked). One customer wrote to us about her experience, saying, “This is sooo wonderful and kind, thank you so much! I am so grateful. These spices are incredible. I can truly taste the difference. Because the spices are good, I will tell other people. But because of your kindness, I will tell everyone I can and encourage them to purchase from you.”

We also donated spices to many organizations and charities, including:

Want to read our previous years' Impact Reports? 

• Read our 2021 Impact Report
• Read our 2020 Impact Report
• Read our 2019 Impact Report
• Read our 2018 Impact Report