Spicy Politics

Bill Penzey Jr. of Penzeys Spices—a Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, company with about 70 stores in 30 states and an online mail-order business—emailed customers in the week after Trump’s election the first of hundreds of such messages to come. “The open embrace of racism by the Republican Party in this election is now unleashing a wave of ugliness unseen in this country for decades,” he wrote. Penzey often addresses Trump voters directly in his missives. “You just voted for an openly racist candidate for the presidency of the United States of America,” he wrote in another postelection email. The messages simultaneously post to the company’s Facebook page, where traffic has blossomed with commenters complaining about his bias and promising to boycott the brand. But more often, they praise his stances, most of which are pegged to promotions. The letters all end with a radio readout-style segue to the latest special offer. A late October message telling Trump supporters “please wake up, your country needs you,” ended with an offer of a couple of chili powders, “free with just a $5 purchase.” They’re for a second-day reheated chili on Election Day, Penzey reasoned—so all those non-Trump-supporters heading to the polls won’t have to think about cooking.

Foot traffic to his brick-and-mortar stores multiplies with Penzey’s politically themed giveaways. In Oregon, they’re “swamped,” according to one employee at Penzeys’ Portland store, who asked not to be named for fear she’d lose her job. New customers, resistance-niks all, don’t tend to come to the store for culinary inspiration, the Portland employee tells me. “A lot of them don’t know how to cook!” she says, her voice tinged with disappointment, “but they do support Bill’s politics.” Ninety percent of the customers she meets these days come buy the blends to support Penzey’s mission to “heal the world.” And they come knowing they’ll leave the store with a little something extra—all the better to give to an unwitting conservative cousin as a gift, as one Facebook commenter wrote she plans to do this holiday season.

Such subversive family feuding is endemic to the brand. Bill Penzey’s sister Patty Erd ran a rival spice blend business, The Spice House, at the time of the 2016 election; she offered a promotion then, too. “My husband and I are very careful to never bring politics or personal opinions into our spice company, they have no business there,” Erd wrote, in the days after her brother’s initial letter decrying racist Republicans. The promotional code “NOPOLITICS” would secure free shipping, Erd added, for anyone who’d recently found themselves wondering what spice blends have to do with presidential elections. Their sibling rivalry wasn’t new: Bill Penzey Sr. opened The Spice House in 1957. Bill Jr. struck out on his own and incorporated Penzeys in 1986, leaving his sister and her husband to take over the family business in 1992—as his competition.

As Penzeys grew from a small mail-order business, Bill Jr.’s personality and politics dominated. In 2005, then the owner of more than two dozen stores, Penzey founded a food magazine with a social justice bent. Penzeys One had a circulation in the tens of thousands—mostly customers—but dedicated each issue to more than recipes: prison reform, immigration policy, environmentalism, gay rights. Then, as now, scaring away conservative customers didn’t worry him.

Penzey himself has resisted opportunities to expound on his marketing style. When I pitched him earlier this month, he asked, with all the quivering terribilità I’d come to expect as a reader of his intensely heartfelt promotional emails, “Where would the value be in me trying to get you to understand what we are doing when your salary depends on you not understanding it?” (The Spice House’s current CEO declined to talk on the record.)

Elsewhere in spice blends, mixing artisanal seasonings with polarizing politics isn’t so easy to understand either. Thora Pomicter, founder of the Teeny Tiny Spice Company in Harrisonburg, Virginia, said she couldn’t imagine sprinkling partisan outrage into an online marketing campaign for the organic spice blends she sells in 31 states and D.C. “Politics does not have any place in my business,” she said, sounding somewhat aghast—and almost alarmingly sane. “I sell spices,” she emphasized, in case I’d gotten her line of work confused. “That’s not a political thing.”

Even on the activist cutting edge of the industry, contemporary electoral politics are almost irrelevant. “We’re working on a scale of several thousands of years,” says Ethan Frisch, a former line cook and pastry chef who founded the spice company Burlap & Barrel: It buys and sell spices straight from farmers in Tanzania, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Turkey, Spain, Egypt, and Indonesia. Frisch and his cofounder Ori Zohar prefer that their fresh take on an ancient commodities trade supersede partisan distractions. “It’s a business,” Zohar says, “it’s not positioning, it’s not a proclamation. We want you to buy spices from these farmers that we’re building a relationship with—as opposed to using the business as a platform for our positions on this issue and that issue.”

Frisch’s pet issues are getting around the spice industry’s entrenched standards, such as the fixed length of a cinnamon stick, the circumference of a peppercorn, the color of a cardamom pod. None of these restrictions favors farmers, whose livelihoods are dependent on a longstanding network of consolidators and exporters—not to mention the weather and the whims of a volatile market. Nor do the market standards favor flavor, Frisch explains. The market demands a seven-centimeter cinnamon stick, but only so that the sticks fit in those little jars you find in the spice aisle at the supermarket. “Often it winds up being mediocre cinnamon,” he says, “because it has to be soft enough, but not too soft, to roll into a nice tight stick before drying.” The sweetest and spiciest cinnamons fall outside that rollable range for a seven-centimeter stick, so most of us never taste them.

Companies like Penzeys don’t work directly with single-harvest farmers overseas, of course. “Everybody’s buying off of the commodity market,” Zohar says, when I ask how Penzeys compares. “He’s bringing the stuff in by the ton.” While Penzey wields his influence to call for change and critique an unpopular president, within the actual realm of his practical power—the buying and selling of spices—he perpetuates the same old broken system.

But why wouldn’t he? Sending an email, or thousands of them, costs a lot less than cutting off a supplier. And consumers these days really do prefer brands to take a stand: 66 percent of shoppers expect CEOs to pick sides, publicly, on the major issues of the day, according to a recent survey from Sprout Social. When partisan anxieties have the potential to dictate even the most mundane purchases—a pair of shoes, a fleece vest, a pint of ice cream, or a tiny tin of Vietnamese blend to enliven your leftovers—what better way to build loyalty than ideological pandering? As long as a CEO can safely guess where the majority of his customers lean (here the likes of Patagonia, and even Penzeys, have the gift of relative certainty), political marketing may seem more than worth the risk. The only rule to cashing in on Trump-era outrage is a truism even older than Michael Jordan’s: Know your audience.