A spice house the size of a two-car garage.

2014 → today

It started with one bad batch of cumin.

Janice Eaton spent eleven years buying for restaurant kitchens on the Front Range. The recurring frustration was never price — it was that a five-pound bag of ground cumin arrived smelling of dust and cost the same as one that smelled like cumin. Nobody could tell her when it had been milled, because nobody had written it down.

In the spring of 2014 she bought sixty pounds of whole Guatemalan cardamom, a countertop stone mill, and a case of amber jars, and sold the first run out of the back of a station wagon to four chefs she already knew. The rule from day one was the one we still print on the label: the date it was ground goes on the tin.

Twelve years later Copper Mesa runs out of a modest facility on Sweetwood Drive in Golden with a team of six, nine contracted growers, and roughly fourteen hundred accounts — restaurants, small grocers, bakeries and a stubbornly loyal group of home cooks who buy four things a year and notice immediately if anything changes.

We have turned down three offers to co-pack for national brands. The volume would be good and the model would break. We would rather mill on Tuesday.