Beatriz Fontes spent seven years working as a food buyer for a mid-sized supermarket chain in Belo Horizonte. She travelled to trade fairs, tasted hundreds of products, and watched the same thing happen every time: the interesting stuff got filtered out before it reached the shelf. Spices were the worst offender. The chain bought from two or three large distributors, and by the time a jar of cumin reached a customer, it had been sitting in a warehouse for the better part of a year. Beatriz started buying directly from a small cardamom cooperative in Kerala on a personal trip in late 2017, just to see what the difference tasted like. It was not subtle.
She left the supermarket job in early 2019 and spent six months building relationships with growers. The first Cardamom 101 order went out in August 2019 from her apartment kitchen table in the Savassi neighbourhood. She packed 40 jars by hand, printed the labels on a home inkjet, and sent them to friends and a few food bloggers she had met at a pop-up market. Within three weeks, two of those bloggers had posted about the cardamom, and the inbox filled up. The name came from a conversation with her mother, who said learning to cook with cardamom properly was like taking a class you never knew you needed. Lesson 101. It stuck.
Beatriz Fontes grew up in Belo Horizonte and spent seven years as a food buyer for a supermarket chain before founding Cardamom 101 in 2019. She trained her palate at trade fairs across Brazil and on a sourcing trip to Kerala in 2017 that changed how she thought about freshness. She left her buying job in early 2019 to build direct relationships with growers in India, Bahia, and Minas Gerais. Outside the studio, she cooks obsessively on Sunday mornings, keeps a running notebook of failed spice blends, and is slowly learning to read Malayalam so she can correspond directly with the Kerala cooperative without a translator.