Great Tips for Getting Spicy with Organic

By Kirk Giudici


Kirk Giudici learns lessons about sourcing organic spices from a global marketplace, as he nurtures his homespun business into an organic powerhouse. He shares his story and advice on finding great organic spices below.

In 1991 my partner Jade and I started Rising Moon Organics in our home kitchen in the town of Eugene, located in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. We would wake at 2 a.m. and make ravioli all night long as the moon rose and set, and then deliver the individual-sized packages by bicycle to natural food grocery stores around our community. That is why we named our company Rising Moon. The early days were all about bootstrapping, and to keep the business going, we sold our car and did all pick-ups and deliveries on two wheels.

In that first year, we created a door-to-door ravioli subscription service by bicycle. Satur-day mornings Jade would bake amazing foccaccia breads, put them in her basket wrapped in a red-and-white checkered cloth and strap them on the bike along with sauce and ravioli. When we would ride into neighborhoods ringing our bike bell, kids would yell, “The Ravioli People! The Ravioli People!” Today, 14 years later, we still have people who remember buying ravioli from us at their front door way way back when.

Growing Pains
From the beginning, we were committed to sustainable production practices. The early days of Rising Moon Organics included sourcing as many local, organic ingredients as possible, including spices. I knew the family farms where we would get the unpeeled garlic and we spent much of our “non-working” hours hosting garlic-peeling parties with friends. Talk about working our fingers to the bone—after 5 lbs. of peeling, garlic acid literally burnt our fingertips. I also remember sourcing parsley from a local organic farm. We would chop off stems, wash leaves and chop each batch fine by hand.

Our ideal was to use only local, organic, fresh produce, but we soon realized that we were becoming the processor as well as the manufacturer and the distributor. It quickly became too much. It took us years to swallow our pride and look for ingredients outside of Oregon. As the years passed, more of our organic herbs and spices came from California, then Mexico, then China.

Up until five years ago, we gave orders to our spice suppliers on a month-to-month basis. However considerable price fluctuations made it difficult for us to track or maintain a consistent margin. Eventually, our volumes grew so big that our suppliers were “out-of-stocking” us, requiring us to contract annually in order to secure availability and some degree of control over costs. Up to that point, our suppliers didn’t want to contract for the small volumes that we needed.

Now, at the beginning of every year we spend time carefully projecting our annual ingredient needs and breaking it down into monthly needs. That up-front planning ensures that the rest of the year will run smoothly for both Rising Moon and our organic ingredient suppliers.

Lessons Learned
When Rising Moon Organics launched our new salsa in late 2004, we had learned from experience that every ingredient’s supply, price and quality were important to ensuring a smooth and consistent production process. As such, our top priority was to understand the specifications of sourcing these ingredients. Here are a few lessons about the application and sourcing of organic spices that we’ve learned at Rising Moon Organics:

Organic herbs and spices are known to have high microbial counts. With a fresh product like salsa, these microbial counts can make the difference between a 20-day and a 50-day shelf life. Although irradiation is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for sterilizing spices, those that are certified organic may not be irradiated. Heat sterilization (or blanching), is the preferred method for processing heartier organic spices, such as nutmeg or clove; however, heat sterilization isn’t suitable for treating delicate ingredients, such as organic cilantro or tarragon, because it can destroy some of the essential oils and flavors. Non-organic cilantro might be put through a chlorine wash to kill bacteria, but that process disqualifies it for organic certification.

So how do we use a tasty herb like organic cilantro in our salsa without having it be the enemy of our shelf life? As an organic manufacturer, I often put on my food science hat to solve these riddles. A combination of CO2 fumigation and freezing is often used; however, extensive testing is still required to ensure food safety measures have been met.

To further ensure shelf-life and quality, when we receive our spice shipments at the plant, we immediately transfer them into labeled, airtight containers to preserve freshness, and we try not to have more than a two-month inventory on hand at any given time.

Quality control and testing goes a long way to verifying the sanitation and validation of our products. We constantly test our ingredients for nonconformity to organic certification standards every time we run a production cycle.

We understand that changes can occur and must stand watch over our quality processes. Changes happen year-to-year depending on the crop season or if our spice broker switches from one farmer to another.

We get our spices from The Great Spice Co. and have an excellent relationship with them, which goes a long way towards ensuring our faith in the products we bring in-house. Whenever a supply change happens from one season to another, we get samples and test for color, cut, flavor, potency and overall quality. We now keep specifications on file of all our spices and use them as benchmarks for new batches or farmers when changes happen.

Some nonconforming variations that we look for are obvious, such as color variations in the parsley, or changes in the size of the dry onion chop. When we discover these types of variations in the middle of production, they won’t hold things up, but we will work on securing more consistency for the next order. In one situation, we discovered that our rosemary was contributing a bitter aftertaste to some of our recipes. We compared rosemary from different suppliers and found that taste can vary greatly and we now require testing to ensure consistent flavor.

Spicy peppers are also interesting. This past year I learned about Scoville Heat Units, which define the heat intensity of a pepper. We found out that a spicy jalapeño can range from 5,000 to 30,000 heat units, and for hot pepper masochists there are Habanera peppers that can have more than 500,000 heat units. Keeping track of the Scoville on our peppers makes the difference between a mild salsa with little punch and a crazy hot salsa that scalds the roof of your mouth and makes your eyes water.

These might seem like small details, but providing a consistent product and flavor profile to our consumers is all about the details. If too many details change, our consumers will turn to other manufacturers for their products. Our adherence to consistency, quality and great taste ensures that will never happen. People say to me, “Wow Kirk, that’s good salsa! What makes it taste so good?” I tell them that it is all in the spices. The fresher the spice, the greater the taste.

Kirk Giudici is the founder and CEO of Rising Moon Organics, a Eugene, OR-based manufacturer of organic ravioli, sauces and salsas. He is known for his amazing recipes and bocce ball abilities. Contact him at kirk@risingmoon.com.