The Day My Children Said "Kar De Mo Me" — And Kardemome Was Born
Every good thing in my life has started in the kitchen.
Not at a desk. Not in a meeting room. Not with a business plan or a pitch deck. In the kitchen, with a handful of spices, the smell of something roasting in a pan, and my children wandering in asking what I was making.
That is where Kardemome began.
It started with a problem I couldn't ignore
For as long as I can remember, I've made my own spice mixes at home. Not because I had to — the supermarket shelves are full of options — but because I couldn't bring myself to use them. I'd read the labels. I'd taste the difference. That flat, dusty, one-dimensional flavour that comes out of a mass-produced packet is not what Indian food is supposed to taste like.
Indian cooking is layered. It's complex. It builds. One spice wakes up another, a third rounds everything off, and the result is something that hits you in waves — first the aroma, then the warmth, then the depth that lingers long after the meal is over.
You can't get that from a factory. You can only get it from someone who cares.
So I kept making my own. For my family. For years.
Then the requests started
It began with my sister-in-law. She'd eaten at our home one evening and couldn't stop talking about the biryani. Not the rice, not the meat — the spice. She asked if I could give her some of the masala. I made an extra batch. She came back for more.
Then a neighbour. Then a colleague of my husband's. Then a friend who had moved to the US for work and called me saying she missed the food — really missed it — and could I please send her something.
I remember standing at the kitchen counter one afternoon with a long list of people who had asked for my spice mixes, thinking: what on earth is happening here?
My children were the ones who said it out loud first.
"Mum, just do it. Kar de, Mome. Just do it."
Kar de mo me. Just do it, Mum.
And I did.
Why every blend has a number
When people first see our packaging — Biryani Masala No. 15, Chai Masala No. 135, Garam Masala No. 24 — they often ask what the number means.
The number is the number of attempts it took to get the blend exactly right.
No. 135 means I made 135 versions of that Chai Masala before I was satisfied. 135 batches, 135 cups of tea, 135 mornings of adjusting ratios — a little more cardamom, a little less pepper, more ginger, less clove — until the cup in my hand tasted exactly the way I wanted it to taste.
Some blends came together in 15 tries. Some took over a hundred. Each number on our packaging is a small, honest record of that journey.
I think about this whenever someone writes to tell me their family loved a dish they made with one of our masalas. All those attempts, all those adjustments — they were all for that moment. For that message. For that family sitting around that table.
What "homemade" actually means
The word homemade gets used a lot these days. Sometimes it means very little.
When I say Kardemome is homemade, I mean that every blend is made the way I would make it for my own family. The spices are whole before they are ground. Nothing is added that doesn't belong there. No artificial colours, no flavour enhancers, no preservatives — because I wouldn't put those things in food I was cooking for my children, and I won't put them in food I'm sending to yours.
Small batches only. Because larger batches mean compromises, and I refuse to compromise.
This is harder to do at scale. It would be much easier to hand everything to a factory and let them handle it. But then it wouldn't be Kardemome. It would just be another packet on a shelf.
The name
Kardemome is the Norwegian-English spelling of cardamom — elaichi, the spice that sits at the heart of so much of what we make.
There's a reason cardamom is called the queen of spices. It's in our chai, our biryanis, our sweet dishes, our garam masala. It's complex in a way that's hard to describe — floral and warm and cooling all at once. It has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years.
When we were looking for a name, cardamom felt right. And the Norwegian spelling felt special — a nod to the fact that this little spice doesn't belong to any one country or any one kitchen. It belongs to the world.
Just like flavour does.
For the families far from home
One of the things that moves me most about what we do is the messages we receive from people who have moved abroad.
A student in Chicago who grew up eating her mother's biryani every Sunday and thought she'd never taste it again quite the same way. A family in Salt Lake City who said our masalas make their home feel like home. A mother in Dubai who told me she doesn't feel so far from Mumbai when she has a cup of chai made with our Chai Masala No. 135.
Food is memory. Food is belonging. Food is the language that doesn't require translation, the thing that connects you to where you came from no matter how far you've gone.
That is what I want Kardemome to be. Not just a spice company. A connection.
The beginning, not the end
We are called Kardemome because cardamom is the beginning of so many things — the first note in a biryani, the first sip of morning chai, the first thing you smell when you walk into a kitchen that is doing something wonderful.
And this is just our beginning too.
We have fourteen blends right now. Each one is a story, a memory, a hundred small attempts at getting something exactly right. There are more to come — more regions of India we haven't explored yet, more family recipes we want to preserve, more tables we want to sit at.
But for now, I'm just grateful you found us.
Come into the kitchen. Let's cook something together.
—
Sushma
Founder, Kardemome