How single-origin spice brand Burlap & Barrel prepares for the holiday rush
For single-origin spice company Burlap & Barrel, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the brand’s Super Bowl due to the amount of cooking being done.
During the holidays, Burlap & Barrel’s sales go up by 3 to 5 times what a typical day would be like. It’s why the company spends the rest of the year sourcing and preparing spice in time for the end-of-the-year rush. But Burlap & Barrel — which mostly sells its spices direct-to-consumer — prepares its holiday supply chain differently than most spice companies that rely on co-packers and intermediary spice suppliers. Being prepared for the holiday period is also important because Burlap & Barrel also kicks the season off with its annual birthday campaign in October, including launching new products and collaborations.
A global network of partner farmers
Many spice brands work with a network of intermediaries that supply the finished product for white labeling. But Burlap & Barrel’s model dictates that it works directly with farmers from the planting and harvesting phase until the spices are ready for packaging months later.
Burlap & Barrel has major sales growth during the holiday season, which kicks off in October with the company’s annual birthday campaign and runs through December. During this time of year, some of Burlap & Barrel’s bestsellers are seasonal mainstays like sage, thyme, rosemary and mulling spices like cinnamon and cloves. However, due to the promotion of the preset bundles for gifting, the company also likes to ensure there is sufficient supply of the core spices collection, which includes cumin, chili powder and black peppercorn. As a result, the brand spends the entire year ahead of October preparing for this busy period.
Burlap & Barrel’s co-founder Ori Zohar told Modern Retail that because spices are agricultural products, the team starts working with partner farmers months in advance. “We try to use our October birthday as an excuse to preempt the holiday season so that people are not in a last-minute scramble to stock up,” he said.
However, operating on an agricultural schedule also makes planning for peak periods, like the holidays, an intricate process.
When Burlap & Barrel started in 2016, Zohar and his co-founder Ethan Frisch traveled to source a small handful of spices from farmers overseas, starting with Afghanistan, where Frisch had done aid work in 2010. Over time, more suppliers, like a cardamom grower in Guatemala and peppercorn farmers in Zanzibar, were added to the roster one by one.
Now, Burlap & Barrel works with several hundred farmers across 27 countries, with the company typically paying its partner farmers five to 20 times the commodity rate they may get from a large producer. As Zohar described it, the business model makes the company partly a farmer-financing business as well as a consumer-facing brand. That means most of the investment is going toward core parts of the business rather than marketing.
The overseas farmers grow, grind, clean and prepare the spices for export for the company to packaging. Thus, Burlap & Barrel begins very early to make sure it has enough supply for the end of the year.
Take chili peppers, for example. Zohar said Burlap & Barrel’s partner is a third-generation paprika farmer in Hungary. “We give him a down payment even before he’s planting; we’ll usually pay a 50% down during the planting season,” Zohar said. Then the seeds grow over three to four months into chilies and chili peppers, with the harvesting and drying process taking another two to three months. After grinding, blending and shipping to the U.S., Zohar said, “We receive, test and make sure that the spices are clean and safe before packing them in jars immediately.”
Building a holiday season playbook
Once Burlap & Barrel has sufficient supply for the busy season, the team’s focus shifts to marketing these products. It first teases demand for the holiday season through its annual birthday sale in October. From October through the end of the year, a series of seasonal products and collaborations rolls out.
This month, for example, the company launched a new line of sugars, with variants like maple and coconut sugar coming in the coming weeks.
With these seasonal products, the last three months of the year see about 10% to 20% of customers buying spices for gifting, though it’s difficult to track orders that will be gifted in person.
Given the uptick in demand and gift-friendly products, the brand invests much more in marketing.
“We haven’t done a lot of paid acquisition, but this year we’re mailing out a printed catalog to our customers to bring them back to the site,” Zohar said. “We don’t do a lot of digital paid ads,” he went on. “Everything we do has to be profitable and has to work for our farmers [and] for our customers.”
While the majority of the business is direct-to-consumer, Zohar said wholesale expansion is gradual due to the company’s model. The company mostly partners with specialty shops and sells to small businesses through Faire. Earlier this year, Burlap & Barrel launched at grocery chain The Fresh Market.
“Currently, wholesale is around 15% of our business, but it’s the fastest growing portion; Two years ago, it was 5% of our business,” he said. “We’re still learning how to do national retail, and we’re honestly still a little scared of it,” he said, due to big retail orders being locked as early as March.
Spices and other cooking ingredients like sauces and condiments tend to be in high demand during the end-of-year holidays.
Oisin Hanrahan, CEO of Keychain, a CPG marketplace that connects manufacturers with brands and retailers, said the demand for these cooking items throughout the holiday season means brands have to ensure their supply chains are able to keep up.
“Everyone in CPG — from big retailers to brands to manufacturers — is being pushed to shorten their planning cycles from years to months,” he said. This is especially true in the fourth quarter, Hanrahan continued, when seasonality puts more pressure on suppliers to meet quicker turnaround times.
As for Burlap & Barrel’s supply chain, Zohar said that’s where the biggest investment still lies. “We still have this really big wish list of spices and origins that we’d love to build supply chains in — that’s what we’re focusing on.”