The Malabar Pepper Company

We’ve been running things from Padmapuram for a good while now. It’s a quiet spot near Pattanur, mostly green and full of trees. The air smells like rain and earth most of the year. Here at The Malabar Pepper Company, we don’t have fancy offices or big glass windows. It’s just us and the bags of pepper. Every day starts with checking the harvest that comes in from the local growers around Edayannur. We spend a lot of time just looking at the berries, making sure they’re dry enough before they get packed. Sometimes the humidity makes it tricky, but that’s just how it is in this part of the country. We sit on the porch during lunch and talk about the weather or the price of fuel. It’s not a complicated life. We know most of the people who bring their crops to us by their first names. Our hands usually stay a bit stained from the work, and the smell of spice follows us home at night. It’s hard work, especially when the sun is beating down on the courtyard, but there’s a certain rhythm to it that feels right. We don’t try to be anything we aren’t. We just take the pepper, clean it up, and get it ready to go out to wherever it’s needed. It’s what we know how to do, and we keep at it day after day.