How We Make It
One kitchen, four people, 40-jar batches. Everything is toasted, milled, cooked, filled and labelled here — we have never used a contract packer and do not intend to.
Tuesday: toasting and milling
Whole spices go into a dry 40 cm pan in 300-gram lots, one variety at a time, because cumin is done in ninety seconds and coriander wants nearly three minutes. Everything is spread on trays and cooled to room temperature before it is milled — mill it warm and the oils bind into a paste on the burrs, and the blend tastes muddy for its whole life. We mill on a burr, not a blade, at a coarse setting you can see in the jar.
Wednesday: sauce day
Slow Red is six hours in open 30-litre pans. Not a stockpot with a lid — open, so water leaves and the volume falls by half. We hold it between 92 and 96°C and stir on the half hour. Then hot-filling at 88°C, cap, invert for two minutes to sterilise the lid, and into the water cooler. That gives us a vacuum seal and an eighteen-month unopened shelf life without a preservative in the deck.
Thursday: filling and labelling
Forty jars at a time, filled by hand on a scale to ±0.5 g, and labelled with the milling or cooking date rather than a bare best-before. The batch code on the lid is the date plus the lot number of the dominant ingredient, so if a grower’s lot ever turns out to be a problem we can name every jar it went into within an hour.
Food safety, plainly
We are a registered food establishment NL-KIT-4471 with the Nederlandse Voedsel- en Warenautoriteit (NVWA). Our HACCP plan is audited annually and our critical control points are the toasting temperature, the hot-fill temperature, the pH of every acidified sauce, and the cooling curve. Sauces are tested for pH in every batch and we hold a retained sample of each batch for eighteen months.
| Control point | Target | How it is checked | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spice toasting | 150–165°C surface | Probe plus timed lots | Every lot |
| Sauce reduction | 92–96°C, 6 h | Logged probe readings | Every 30 min |
| Hot fill | ≥ 85°C at fill | In-line probe | Every jar run |
| Acidified pH | ≤ 4.2 | Calibrated meter | Every batch |
| Cooling | ≤ 20°C within 2 h | Water cooler, logged | Every batch |
What we refuse to use
- Anti-caking agents. A blend that clumps a little is a blend with real oil in it.
- “Natural flavouring”, which is a legal category, not an ingredient.
- Irradiated or ethylene-oxide-treated spice.
- Preservatives in the sauces. The pH and the hot fill do that job.
- Silica gel sachets in the jars. Keep the lid on instead.
Packaging
Glass jars with steel lids, both recyclable and both accepted in Dutch kerbside collection. Labels are uncoated paper with a water-based adhesive so the glass can be washed and reused; the crates are untreated pine. Our outer boxes are single-wall corrugate with paper tape and no plastic void fill. The one plastic we still use is the nitrogen-flushed pouch for cheese and preserved lemon in the meal kits, and we have not yet found a replacement that keeps them safe.
Where the raw material comes from is on the sourcing page; what is in each jar is on the allergens and ingredients page.