How we grew spice business from NYC apartment

When Ethan Frisch first tasted wild-grown cumin hand-picked in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains in 2012, he was shocked.

A former chef who once worked in a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York, Frisch traveled rural Afghanistan as an infrastructure program coordinator for the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of agencies that support rural development, health and education initiatives throughout Asia and Africa.

The quality of the spices he encountered — even at small markets and roadside restaurants — blew him away. “I thought I knew my way around a spice cabinet. And then I realized that there was a whole world of spices that I had not had access to, that were not really being imported to the U.S.,” says Frisch, 38.

The wild-grown cumin inspired Frisch and his longtime friend Ori Zohar, 39, to co-found New York-based Burlap & Barrel, which sells kitchen spices sourced directly from small-scale farmers around the world. Each man chipped in around $20,000 to launch the company in 2016, they say: Frisch emptied his life savings, and Zohar, a serial entrepreneur, pulled his money from a mortgage tech startup he was shuttering.

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The business has been profitable since Day 1, says Frisch. It grew its annual gross revenue from roughly $100,000 in its first full year to nearly $8 million in 2024, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Sourcing directly from farmers is the key, says Frisch. For the three years he worked in Afghanistan, he spent his free time using his international development contacts to build a network of small-scale farmers, in countries ranging from Guatemala to Zanzibar.

The business model allows Burlap & Barrel to skip markups from the industry’s brokers and middlemen, while paying the farmers anywhere from double to more than 10 times what they’d typically receive for their crops, Frisch says.

$40,000 in startup funds may sound like a lot of money, but Frisch and Zohar — who serve as co-CEOs — felt financially pressured by the costs of travel and spice acquisition, they say. Instead of renting office space, they worked from Frisch’s Queens apartment, which he’d managed to register as a “spice warehouse” with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

“We went to IKEA [and] bought shelving. We made a packing area, a storage area and a shipping area. We really transformed his entire living room into a spice production facility,” says Zohar, noting that whenever he left Frisch’s apartment, his clothes smelled so strongly of spices that they inevitably “had to go through the wash.”

Frisch and Zohar didn’t take salaries until 2018, with Frisch surviving on unemployment benefits and “living on scrambled eggs” as they sold mostly to restaurants around New York, he says. The co-founders took minimum-wage salaries in 2018 before ramping up to more livable wages the following year, they say.

When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, they worried they’d be out of business: Restaurants were their biggest source of revenue. Instead, at-home cooks splurged on $10 jars of high-end spices from Burlap & Barrel’s website to step up their culinary game with fancy restaurants shuttered.

A Bon Appetit review of the brand’s Vietnamese cinnamon in February 2020 helped, Frisch notes.

“By May, home cooks had more than made up for the sales that we had lost from restaurants,” says Zohar, adding that Burlap & Barrel ultimately brought in roughly $3 million in 2020 sales. The company now packs and ships all of its spices from warehouses in Las Vegas and Hagerstown, Maryland.

Burlap & Barrel has landed partnerships with chefs like Martha Stewart and Marc Murphy, and placement on FX’s television show “The Bear.” The company appeared on an April 2023 episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank” — an idea the co-founders credit to Zohar’s mother, an “avid” viewer of the show — which sent its website traffic “through the roof” before the episode finished airing, Zohar says.

Burlap & Barrel faces a few obstacles to its continued expansion. One is its price point: Burlap & Barrel products cost roughly the same as comparable items from other luxury spice providers like Diaspora Co. and Evermill, but noticeably more than basic grocery store spices.

A 1.8-ounce jar of Burlap & Barrel’s bestselling Royal Cinnamon costs $9.99, while a 4-ounce container of cinnamon from food giant McCormick & Company costs just $6.66 on Amazon. Eventually, Frisch and Zohar will run out of potential new customers willing to pay the upcharge, particularly with many Americans wary of rising grocery costs, they note.

A potential solution, they say, is to sell products beyond kitchen spices. Burlap & Barrel typically launches 50 new products each year, which last year included a line of single-origin sugars and a partnership with the Jane Goodall Institute on jars of honey from Tanzania.

Another challenge lies in the U.S. tariffs announced by President Donald Trump on April 2. Burlap & Barrel sources spices from a variety of countries named in Trump’s initial policy announcement, which is now in the middle of a 90-day pause and currently replaced by a baseline 10% tariff on all imported goods.

If Trump’s original rates go into effect in July, Burlap & Barrel could pay a 46% import rate on spices from Vietnam, or a 26% rate on products from India.

The company plans to absorb any added tariff costs for the foreseeable future, Frisch says. But the uncertainty made the co-founders recalculate their expectations for 2025: Instead of forecasting 10% revenue growth over last year, they now hope to merely match 2024’s sales figures, they say.

Burlap & Barrel would still turn a profit with that result, adds Zohar.

Longer-term, the co-founders remain optimistic, they say. If the tariffs get rolled back, they can resume business as usual. If the U.S. economy suffers, whether from tariff fallout or inflation, more people could skip eating out at restaurants in favor of staying home and cooking for themselves, they predict.

“We’re expecting to grow a lot in the next few years,” says Zohar, adding: “The spices in your grocery store are stale and unimpressive.”

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”

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