I’ll never forget the moment Rushi held up two fistfuls of cumin — one from a bulk distributor we’d been evaluating, the other from a farmer named Vikram in the Barmer district of Rajasthan — and said, “Smell them both. Tell me these are the same product.”
They weren’t even close.
The distributor sample smelled flat, almost dusty, like something that had been sitting in a warehouse for months. Vikram’s cumin hit you before it reached your nose — warm, earthy, almost peppery, with this deep sweetness underneath that I’d never experienced in cumin bought off a shelf in the States. That single moment changed the entire trajectory of Trevean Spice. It also taught me one of the most important product management lessons I’ve ever learned: you cannot build something extraordinary if you don’t understand where your inputs come from.
TL;DR: Two cumin samples that smell completely different tell you everything about your supply chain. We met Vikram, a farmer in Rajasthan, and it changed how we make every product decision. The cumin test is simple: if you can’t trace it, you can’t trust it.
How Did a Farmer in Rajasthan Change Everything?
Rushi grew up around spices. Her family’s kitchen was a living library of blends, techniques, and traditions passed down across generations. So when we started Trevean Spice, she wasn’t interested in sourcing commodity spices from the same brokers everyone else used. She wanted to go to the source.
That’s how we ended up in Rajasthan, sitting cross-legged on a rug in Vikram’s home while his wife served us chai with cardamom pods she’d cracked by hand that morning. Vikram is a third-generation cumin farmer. His family has cultivated the same land in the Thar Desert region for decades, and the way he talked about cumin — the soil, the timing of the harvest, the way the desert air dries the seeds naturally — it was clear this man was building a product, not just growing a crop.
He showed us how the big aggregators worked. They’d buy his cumin at rock-bottom prices, mix it with lower-grade seed from other regions — sometimes from entirely different crops — and sell the blended product as “premium.” He pulled out a jar of what one major exporter had sent back to him as a “sample of their finished product,” made from his harvest. It was half cumin, half filler. Coriander powder. Rice husk. Sawdust in some of the worst cases he’d heard about from neighboring farms.
Rushi looked at me and said the thing that still drives every product decision we make: “If the people buying this knew what was actually in it, they’d never buy it again.”
Why Does Nobody Want to Talk About Spice Adulteration?
Here’s what we learned as we dug deeper: spice adulteration isn’t a fringe problem. It’s systemic. Studies have found that a significant portion of ground spices on grocery store shelves contain undeclared fillers, artificial colors, or lower-cost substitutes. Turmeric gets cut with lead chromate to boost its color. Chili powder gets mixed with brick dust. Black pepper gets bulked up with papaya seeds.
The bigger spice companies know this. They’ve built supply chains optimized for volume and margin, not for purity. And because most consumers can’t tell the difference between pure cumin and cumin that’s been stretched with coriander powder, the system perpetuates itself.
As a product manager, this hit me hard. Because this is the exact same pattern I’ve seen in software, in services, and in every industry where the gap between what’s marketed and what’s delivered quietly widens over time. Companies optimize for the metric that’s easiest to measure — cost per unit, gross margin, throughput — and stop asking the harder question: is what we’re shipping actually what we said it would be?
How Did Testing for Purity Change How We Think About Everything?
Rushi and I decided that if we were going to build Trevean Spice around transparency, we needed more than a philosophy — we needed proof. So we started testing. Every single batch. Not just the standard food safety panels, but deeper analysis for fillers, adulterants, and potency.
The results confirmed what Vikram had told us, and what Rushi had suspected her whole life: the spices most people cook with are shadows of what they could be. When we tested Vikram’s cumin against three store-bought alternatives, his scored dramatically higher in volatile oil content — the compounds that give cumin its actual flavor and aroma. The store brands weren’t bad in a way you’d notice if you’d never had the real thing. They were just… less. Diluted. A photocopy of a photocopy.
This became our product thesis. Not “we sell spices.” We sell the original. The version that existed before the supply chain stripped it down to fit a price point.
And if you’re a product manager reading this, you’ve felt this tension before. Every time a feature gets scoped down to hit a deadline. Every time “good enough” replaces “right.” Every time the roadmap prioritizes what’s easy to ship over what actually solves the problem. The cumin test isn’t about cumin. It’s about having the discipline to verify that what you’re building is what you think you’re building.
What Happens When Purity Meets a Tradition Worth Preserving?
But here’s where the story takes a turn I didn’t expect. Knowing where our spices came from — having that direct relationship with Vikram and the other farmers we’ve since partnered with — didn’t just give us purity. It gave us knowledge.
Rushi started spending hours talking with Vikram’s wife, Priya, and the women in their village about how they blended spices. Not recipes exactly, but ratios. Instincts. The way a particular cumin from that particular soil paired with a specific coriander from a farm two villages over. The way they’d add a whisper of black cardamom — not the green, the black, the smoky one — to their everyday dal blend because three generations ago someone’s grandmother discovered it transformed the dish.
These weren’t blends you’d find in any commercial product. They were living traditions, adjusted season by season based on what the harvest yielded, passed from mother to daughter through repetition and taste rather than written measurements.
Rushi saw what I couldn’t yet: this was the product. Not just pure spices, but the tradition of combining them — the craft that gets lost when spices become commodities. She spent weeks working with Priya and other women in the region to translate their intuitive blending into something we could produce consistently while honoring the original ratios and intentions.
Introducing Rajasthan Gold
The result is the blend we’re calling Rajasthan Gold.
It’s our newest addition to the Trevean Spice lineup, alongside Persian Sunrise, Kyoto Garden, Caribbean Sunrise, and Silk Road. And like every blend in the collection, the name isn’t arbitrary — it’s a tribute to the place and the people who made it possible.
Rajasthan Gold is built around Vikram’s cumin as its backbone. From there, Rushi layered in coriander from a neighboring farm, black cardamom from the eastern hills, a touch of dried mango powder (amchur) for brightness, and a finish of ajwain — a seed most Western cooks have never encountered, but one that’s been a staple in Rajasthani kitchens for centuries. The blend is warm, deeply savory, with a complexity that builds as it cooks. It’s made for dal, roasted vegetables, rice dishes, and anything where you want the spice to be the story, not just seasoning in the background.
Every jar traces back to specific farms. We know the soil. We know the farmers. And every batch gets tested for purity before it ever reaches you.
What’s the Product Management Lesson Behind the Blend?
I started this post talking about what product managers can learn from spice sourcing, so let me bring it home.
The best product decisions I’ve ever made — whether in software or in spice — started with going upstream. Not looking at dashboards, competitors, or market reports, but going to the source. Talking to the people who create the raw material your product depends on. Understanding their world before building yours.
In PM terms, Vikram is the user researcher who tells you the truth your analytics can’t. Priya is the domain expert whose intuition contains years of validated learning. The adulterated spice is the feature that tests well in demos but falls apart in production because nobody verified the underlying assumptions.
The cumin test is simple: pick up what you’re building, and ask yourself — do I actually know where this came from? Do I know what’s in it? And if I showed the customer exactly what’s inside, would they still want it?
If the answer is yes, you’ve got something real. If you’re not sure, it’s time to go to Rajasthan — metaphorically or otherwise — and find out.
Trevean Spice’s Rajasthan Gold is coming soon. Follow The Product Managers Journal for the launch story, or subscribe to the blog to be the first to know when it drops.
Related Reading
- AI Can Now Smell a Fake — how AI is learning to detect the adulteration described in this post
- Your Spice Has a Passport Now — the traceability system that makes the cumin test scalable
- NFC Chips: The Future of Product Transparency — the technology layer behind supply chain visibility
- Free Startup PM Toolkit — frameworks for building transparent products
Frequently Asked Questions
What is spice adulteration and how common is it?
Spice adulteration is the practice of adding cheaper substances to spices to increase weight or improve appearance. It’s extremely common — studies show 20–30% of commercial saffron is adulterated, turmeric is frequently boosted with lead chromate, and cumin is cut with coriander powder. The global spice trade’s complexity makes it profitable and hard to detect.
How do you verify spice authenticity and quality?
Start with your senses — smell, color, and texture tell you a lot. Then go deeper: visit your sources, request certificates of analysis, and use spectroscopy or DNA testing for high-value spices. The real answer is building relationships with farmers directly, so you know exactly what you’re getting.
Why does knowing your supply chain matter for product quality?
If you don’t know where your inputs come from, you can’t control what ends up in your product. Supply chain transparency isn’t just about compliance — it’s about building something you can stand behind. The cumin test proves it: two samples with the same label can be completely different products.