The chef held the jar up to his nose, then looked at Mohammad Salehi in disbelief. He had never smelled saffron like that. Nobody in Chicago had. Salehi had carried it from his family’s farm in Afghanistan in a suitcase, walking it restaurant to restaurant, and within months fifteen Chicago kitchens had signed on.
That was 2017. Today Heray Spice supplies more than 400 restaurants nationwide and is on track to pass one million dollars in revenue this year, run out of a Chicago warehouse by a team of six.
Salehi did not arrive in Chicago as a businessman. He grew up a farm boy in Afghanistan, raised by a single mother who put six children through school after losing her husband to the war. Out of high school he went to work as a linguist for the U.S. Army, the Marines, and NATO forces, four years interpreting alongside American troops. When the drawdown came in 2014, his work made him a target at home, and a Special Immigrant Visa for U.S. allies brought him to Chicago. He landed with $295, the money from selling his bike.
Heray Spice buys its saffron directly from a cooperative of 354 farmers in Afghanistan, paying them one and a half to two times the local rate on fair-trade principles, with no middleman skimming the difference.
He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s from the Illinois Institute of Technology, took a six-figure job in cybersecurity, and walked away from it to build a spice company. “Now we employ people,” he said. “Our company brings good income and we are helping farmers in Afghanistan. It’s all because I believe in the ‘American dream.’”
Six people work out of that Chicago warehouse, and Salehi wants fifty more on the payroll within a few years. Scaling a business that small to a national footprint is where Amazon comes in. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) handles the storing, packing, and shipping that once consumed his team. Before, a single day’s orders meant a hundred boxes, tape, bubble wrap, and a person tied up for hours. Now that work moves through Amazon’s fulfillment centers, and his people spend their days on sourcing, quality, and relationships instead. “Shipping is a huge challenge for smaller businesses like us, and FBA alleviates that,” he said.
Seller Central tools provide Salehi with immense value and come built into his account at no added cost. The one he leans on most is an AI listing tool that studies how his products perform against the rest of his category and tells him what to change, a better description here, a stronger image there. He applies the recommendations and watches his listings climb in Amazon’s organic rankings, with sales following. A second tool reads through his customer reviews and summarizes them, showing him whether shoppers are responding to aroma, flavor, or packaging. For a six-person company, that is the kind of insight a small team would normally never see, surfaced in minutes and put straight to work. “We are using that enhancement tool to make our listings much more efficient,” he said. The same insights sharpen everything else he does, his own website, his wholesale accounts, the way he packages and ships. “I’m very happy that Amazon is in the AI and they are integrating new AI improvements,” he said. “With Amazon, we can scale faster because we can focus on different aspects of the business.”
The company donates five percent of its net income to educational charities, including Code to Inspire, which teaches Afghan girls professional skills online, and it has given spices to Chicago food banks and to refugee families arriving from Ukraine.
Heray Spice supplies more than 400 restaurants nationwide and is on track to pass one million dollars in revenue this year, run out of a Chicago warehouse by a team of six.
The more his store sells, the more his cooperative harvests. Heray Spice buys its saffron directly from a cooperative of 354 farmers in Afghanistan, and Salehi said he’s paying them one and a half to two times the local rate on fair-trade principles, with no middleman skimming the difference. Eleven percent of the company, he said, is owned by the farmers themselves, and at year’s end Salehi shares the profits with them. He did the math on the industry he was entering and found that “for every $10 dollars a shopper spends on a jar of spice, 70 cents goes back to farmers. That’s not fair,” he said.
“A lot of farmers are struggling to make a basic living,” he said, remembering his own childhood. “It was always a struggle of should they pay rent first or should they get meat or should they get groceries. Farming shouldn’t be like that.”
The company donates five percent of its net income to educational charities, including Code to Inspire, which teaches Afghan girls professional skills online, and it has given spices to Chicago food banks and to refugee families arriving from Ukraine. “As long as Heray Spice exists, we will keep that five percent for the rest of our company history,” Salehi said.
He talks about Heray Spice the way some people talk about a cathedral, as something meant to outlast its builder. He wants to partner with 10,000 farmers across Afghanistan, India, and Sri Lanka, hire those fifty more Chicagoans, and run a company that lasts a hundred years. “I will have my boys and my grandsons and granddaughters working here,” he said. “It’s here for hundreds of years.”