The Spicery

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Discover, cook and share the tastiest food you'll ever make with our Recipe Kits, Subscriptions and cookbooks! The Spicery has grown from a small market stall in Bath to an extended family of 20 staff and more than 120,000 loyal customers. We are lucky to count many of the best restaurants in the UK as clients; The Fat Duck, Ottolenghi. Rick Stein and many more.

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AboutUs

The Story so far...

The company was started by James Ransome in 2005 in his spare room at home, with £5000 of his own savings. The money stretched to paying for a single metal table, a set of scales, a few gripseal polythene bags, a stereo, a small electric grinder and of course, a few boxes of spices.

James had spent several years working as a chef in some of the top restaurants in the UK and Australia, together with long periods travelling around India and South-East Asia which really helped to fuel his interest in food from around the world, the people who produce it and the places it comes from.

He had his lightbulb moment while standing in a Marrakesh market having a conversation with a girlfriend about future life plans. In answer to a question about what on earth he was going to do with the rest of his life (at that point there was no obvious answer!), he looked around at all these incredibly beautiful, colourful, fragrant ingredients which are so full of mystery and romance and thought to himself ‘I can do something with this!’. And so, The Spicery was born.

Although he'd worked as a chef, it quickly turned out that he wasn’t quite as expert in spices as he’d expected... but he did know that freshness is all-important so the business has always had the aim of grinding and blending spices in small batches and selling them as quickly as possible to make the most of their magical scent and flavour.

The business started on a weekend stall at Green Park market in Bath with a few resealable bags of ingredients and some simple blends. In those days he had to use manilla wage envelopes or brown parcel paper as packaging because he never had enough money for ‘proper’ packaging, but nobody seemed to mind too much!

The mail order business slowly went from Order #1 (sent to James' Mum) to eventually include many of the best restaurants in the UK (the Fat Duck, Ottolenghi, Rick Stein and many others were all good customers over the years), and finally to a simple homemade website all funded from that initial investment.

What do we do at the Spicery?

Although most of the work here is involved in actually producing the product each month - measuring, grinding and packing spices, then assembling orders and sending them out the door, the heart of it all is the test kitchen above the warehouse. There, the development chefs cook every day, testing recipes which the staff enjoy for lunch (or occasionally mid-afternoon, when it’s a dessert!)

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