Honor National Handmade Day with ethically sourced, handmade spices from Yaji Spice.
- Learn how women farmers in West Africa handcraft spices like grains of paradise and locust beans.
- Discover the two-week fermentation process behind preparing locust beans.
- Support fair wages and ethical sourcing while adding bold flavors to your dishes.
Celebrate handmade craftsmanship—shop Yaji Spice’s handmade blends today!
Enjoy our Simple and Tasty Recipe Blog.
National Handmade Day is this April 5, and Yaji Spice invites you to celebrate the day with us. Our herbs and spices are handmade by women farmers in West Africa, making them perfect for celebrating the holiday. While some herbs and spices require more preparation than others, all are handmade with love.
The process of making handmade spices is different for each spice. Several of our spices are grown on a farm, like our grains of paradise, grains of selim, aidan fruit, and Egusi melon seeds. These spices are grown and harvested before being packaged.
“Those ones, you just grow them, clean them, dry them, and they’re ready,” says Anne Toba, founder and director of Yaji Spice.
The handmade spices like grains of paradise and grains of selim come directly from the farm to people’s homes.
Some spices are grown in the wild, like the locust bean. Anne describes it as a large tree that produces long seeds. The women harvest the locust beans from the tree and bring them home to process.
The process to prepare locust beans takes two weeks. First the women boil the seeds in a huge pot for seven days to get the skin to soften. Then the women clean them and ferment them in their kitchens on a big tray made of calabash, an African plant. This takes another seven days. The whole process takes up to two weeks to complete.
The process for the chilies is different from the herbs and spices. Chilies are what Anne calls “hard boiled,” meaning the spices are cleaned, and then dipped in hot water to stop the spice from either ripening or decomposing. “And then they dry it. They dry it in very hot sun. So all of our chilies are produced like that,” Anne says.
Each spice, herb, and chili are handmade with love at Yaji Spice. The women farmers who grow and harvest the spices, herbs, and chilies use their profits to help send their children to school or to help pay for medical supplies. When you buy from Yaji Spice, you know that your spices are ethically sourced, and the women farmers are receiving a fair wage in return for their work. In return, you get fresh herbs and spices that you can use in different culinary creations.
Please note: While no nuts are added to the Nut-Free Suya Spice Blend, Yaji Spice operates in facilities that may process nuts and therefore cannot guarantee the absence of trace allergens. Yaji Spice bears no responsibility for any allergic reactions or related incidents.
