The Spice And Flavor Industry

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The spice industry has evolved from primitive humans flavoring meat with leaves, to multi-billion dollar companies injecting chemical compounds into common foods; from tasting a few minute grains on entrées to feeling a discharge of natural and artificial flavors from exquisite candies, and from scavenging the world for priceless spices to inspecting every ingredient for harmful side-affects.

The first speculated accounts of adding flavorings or spices to food go back over fifty thousand years, when primitive humans used aromatic leaves to flavor food (Add Spice). They wanted to cook meat in a hot pit, so they wrapped it in leaves to protect it from soot and ash. After taking the meat out of the greens, they noticed a distinct change in flavor. Thus the art of seasoning was born (The History of Spice). And that art was not officially seen until thousands of years later.

The first recorded use of spice, in 3000 B.C., was from an Assyrian myth, which said "gods drank sesame wine the night before they created the earth". But spices were not developed until 200 B.C., when the Romans sailed from Egypt to India for spice trade and valued spices as highly as gold. Spice trading continued in Rome until around 1200, when Marco Polo's exploration of Asia established Venice as the most important trade port. Columbus then arrived in America in 1492 with a partial-plan to find spice. About fifteen years later, Magellan took voyage to sail west around the world with five ships. Although he died in the Philippines, one ship returned to Spain, bringing back enough pepper so that the trip was a financial success.

After several countries participated in spice trade, it finally entered the United States in 1797 by Captain Jonathan Carnes. He brought the first large cargo of pepper from Sumatra, which put the U.S. in world spice trade for the first time (Spice Advice). By 1805, the U.S. reached the peak of pepper trade with Sumatra, and exports alone totaled seven million pounds that year (Spice History Timeline). The spice industry started in 1821, in Boston, Massachusetts, where the first nameless spice grinding company was formed (Spices: Time Line).

Other spice and flavor companies formed as well; today they are huge corporations. Two of them, International Flavor & Fragrances (IFF) and McCormick, started out with a few ideas and a concrete plan.

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