Cape Herb & Spice Company

The products are packed in recycled glass bottles with unique transparent adjustable grinders and sealed with snap-on caps. SGS, the world’s leading inspection, certification, verification and testing organisation, certify the products in this range organic.

The sea salt used in The Cape Herb & Spice Company’s products is from the west coast of South Africa. It is hand-harvested and rich in trace elements and minerals, making it one of the most desirable salts in the world. Herbs are sourced from an organic farm nestling in the foothills of South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains. The herbs are left uncrushed, ensuring no flavour, colour or aroma is lost.

The Cape Herb & Spice Company sources its pepper from an organic supplier on an island in the Far East. The supplier practices groundbreaking bio-diversity policies. The peppercorns are sourced from small-scale farmers who work in “Forest Gardens”. This means that the area in which they farm retains complete diversity in terms of plant life: making it ecologically and economically sustainable.

Cape Herb & Spice Company is located in Cape Town on the southwestern tip of Africa.  The city is sandwiched between Table Mountain, one of the world’s most recognisable landmarks, and Table Bay which is cooled by the Atlantic’s Benguela current as it washes up from Antarctica.  The location of the city is not insignificant: Europeans began exploring the west coast of Africa in search of a route to the spice markets in Asia in the 1400s. Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and in 1498 Vasco Da Gama established a sea route to India.

The Dutch East India Company, which was a dominant force in the Asian spice trade, established a settlement at Cape Town in the mid 1600s as a midway point for their trade with Asia. Jan van Riebeeck laid out a 43-acre garden to supply vegetables to ships on their way to the Dutch East Indies.

The mix of European, African and Asian culture in Cape Town also remains and this has given the city a rich culinary heritage. It is against this background that The Cape Herb & Spice Company was formed continuing Cape Town’s tradition as a hub for the spice trade.

The Cape Herb & Spice Company’s factory is situated close to the Steenberg Mountains, about 20 minutes from downtown Cape Town and a short drive to False Bay on the Indian Ocean, the end point of the annual migration from Antarctica of Southern Right whales.

Equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and managed according to international food safety standards, The Cape Herb & Spice Company’s factory is regarded as one of the best of its kind in the world. It has been certified by several food safety companies and is audited regularly by many of the company’s private label clients, some of whom are regarded as world leaders in this regard.