The photograph above is from before I knew there would ever be a Spiced Right. My father, my mother, and me, when I was very small — taken in a studio in Bhubaneswar in 1987, against the patterned backdrop you saw in every portrait studio of that decade.
Decades later, the same hands of my mother's would hand-blend the first batch of Spiced Right masala in our kitchen.
How Ma cooked
Everyone calls her Rama; I call her Ma. She cooks the way every grandmother in our family has cooked — by memory and by feel, never by spoon. The masala dabba came out before the kadai. The dabba I was not allowed to touch.
The dish I remember most clearly isn't anything festive. It's mushroom ghee roast on a Sunday — the wide pan, the ghee, the masala she crushed between her palms before it went in. I remember it because the smell finds me wherever I am, decades on. Ma's love language has always been feeding people. We knew it as kids; we know it now.
How Spiced Right started
In 2021 Ma and I decided to do something together. The idea didn't come from a meeting or a deck. It came from the back of a packet.
I picked up a "Chole Masala" from a supermarket shelf one day. The panel said: coriander, cumin, chillies, salt, dried mango powder, edible vegetable oil, and other spices.
"And other spices."
I went home and asked Ma if she could replicate the chole from a place we used to eat at when I was growing up. She made it. I asked her what was in her masala. She told me — every ingredient, the ratios, why one was in and not another. Then we cooked the supermarket packet side by side. The two bowls were not the same dish.
That was the moment. We didn't need a slogan. We needed a masala you could read.
What we decided to do differently
Every spice we use is named on the pack. The back-of-pack panel is the whole list — no fillers, no preservatives, no "and other spices" hiding things. If amchur is in there, the panel says amchur. If anardana is in there, it's anardana in real ratio. The pack tells you what's in your kadai.
We hand-blend in small batches in our kitchen in Bhubaneswar. We've built 29 blends so far — regional, specific, each one a separate decision rather than a label swap. Awadhi Biryani isn't Hyderabadi. Goda isn't Kolhapuri. Purani Dilli Chole isn't the chole my mother used to make in our own kitchen — because nobody knows the exact ratios of that one but her — but it's built on the same principle. Name everything. Hide nothing.
Why this is still us
The reel at the top of this page is from Mother's Day 2022. Someone asked me what my favourite childhood memory was with Ma, and I said the food. I still say the food. Ma is still at the masala work surface. I'm still next to her, watching the ratios.
The photograph at the top of this page sits on a shelf in our living room. The kitchen at the back of the house is where the brand happens. If you've ever cooked with one of our packs, you've cooked with a masala that started in a small kadai, with a small girl waiting for her mother to finish stirring.
That's it. That's the brand.
— Madhuri