Our Mission
Create exceptional spices and seasonings that inspire people to enjoy cooking, become better cooks and appreciate good food.
INSPIRE GOOD COOKING
Oaktown Spice Shop offers the highest-quality spices, ground and blended in small batches for optimal taste. Founded in 2011, we source the best-tasting spices from around the globe to create the freshest, boldest, and most resonant flavors.
Why our spices? We believe spices should be fresh, well balanced and bursting with flavor. From our careful sourcing, to our in-house small-batch spice grinding and blending process, to our expert blend recipe development, we take great pride in crafting spices and seasonings that are bold and exceptional.
HOW OUR SPICES ARE MADE
We source spices from around the globe, searching for the best-tasting version of each ingredient that we can find.
We grind spices in small batches, careful to maintain the proper speed to preserve potency. Grinding spices too much adds heat and degrades the flavor.
We sift the ground spices to achieve the perfect texture. We mix spices together to create our signature spice blend recipes.
We package our spices and blends and prepare them for shipment directly to customers or to our retail shops.
OUR SHOPS
Oaktown Spice Shop is a joyful stop on the errand routine. Step into a beautiful, colorful and aromatic world, where you can smell your way through glass jars of spices and find inspiration for your cooking.
We take pride in providing warm, informative, imaginative customer service to help guide you through the unfamiliar.
OUR STORY
When Oaktown Spice Shop founders John Beaver and Erica Perez moved to Oakland, they found a community that placed immense value on food. People went to the farmer's market for their produce and the butcher shop for their meat. Why were they not putting as much thought into where they bought their spices?
From John’s experience working at a spice shop in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he knew the difference between high-quality whole spices -- bursting with flavor, plump in shape and vibrant in color -- and their inferior counterparts. Grinding spices in the mill every day also taught him the advantage of freshly ground spices. The moment a whole spice is ground, it begins to release its oils and lose flavor. Grocery store spices, ground years before, were paltry substitutes for the freshly ground stuff.
Inspired by this desire for the highest-quality spices, they launched Oaktown Spice Shop in 2011 to share these delicious ingredients with you.