Essie Bartels worked several odd jobs she hated before opening a company selling mouth-watering spices and sentiments to the world.
A handful of spices and condiments can whet a person’s appetite for business and keep the cash registers ringing, as Ghanaian food entrepreneur Essie Bartels has proven.
For as long as the New Jersey-based Bartels can remember, she has lived a life around food. From an early age, she was the only one of five siblings tasked with cooking for the entire family.
“I started cooking around the age of seven! I am the first daughter so my mother wouldn’t let me out of her sight when she was cooking. At the time, I hated it because when you are that young you don’t want to be in the kitchen, you want to be playing with your friends but that was what she wanted me to do at the time so that is what I did,” says Bartels.
Those early culinary lessons would eventually prepare her to launch Essie Spice, a flavorful journey that has led to a whole foods brand featured in TIME magazine and now stocked in over 13 stores across the United States and Africa. Her love affair with spices was ignited in Ghana.
“My mum used to travel to London and buy spice racks which were very pretty but she would only use like five or six spices out of a rack of 15, so all the other spices would be left unused because they were not traditional spices and as a result they would go bad and be thrown away. So I would take them and figure out what to use all those spices for and I would come up with ideas.”
Her childhood dream was to become the CEO of a large corporate organization; but her first passion was science.
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Going Down The Spice Route
Essie Bartels worked several odd jobs she hated before opening a company selling mouth-watering spices and sentiments to the world.
