Vendor Highlight: Spice Sanctuary

This time for Vendor Highlight we are featuring an awesome vendor from Alberta – Spice Sanctuary! Here’s what they have to say about some of their company’s sustainability initiatives:

The premium organic spices and blends offered by Spice Sanctuary (a local Canmore company) exude freshness and maximum flavour, so you actually need less! Why? They are all carefully hand-picked and recently harvested by the best small farmers around the world.

Founder Trusha Patel takes great care to directly source all the products to ensure that they are the best grades available. In addition, by keeping the supply chain as short as possible (more on that below) and preserving the volatile oils along each step, you can look forward to a farm-to-pantry freshness that is unmatched. With a focus on sourcing those hard to find specialty spices, and developing unique and versatile additive free blends, Spice Sanctuary has become the first Canadian spice company to win a Great Taste Award, the world’s most coveted blind-tasted food award for specialty food producers.

Spice Sanctuary is not only a leader in taste and quality, but sustainability as well.  In 2015 it was a Canmore Business Awards finalist for the Environmental Stewardship Award. Spice Sanctuary products are free from synthetically produced additives and are 100% organic, which eliminates carbon and chemical intensive processes.  Further, it has become the first Canadian spice company to set up a tree planting program.  Working with a local Albertan company, the program supports afforestation and carbon storage by encouraging more trees to be planted with each sale.  To date, nearly 800 trees have been planted by the company.

Spice Sanctuary is also committed to supporting social enterprise. They support local businesses by using only Canadian companies for its other supplies and services.  They have a farm to pantry promise which serves to cut out all middlemen and brings you farm direct spices in just 5 short steps, from the farmer, to the processor, to Spice Sanctuary’s Canadian packing facility, to stores like Spud, and then to you.  Not only does this short supply chain optimize freshness, but by working with the farmers and processors directly, Spice Sanctuary is able to better support social enterprise initiatives such as more organic farming education, incomes for women and other better education for the farmers’ children.