Our story
A house, not a brand.
Al Tahoor Spices is a family grinding unit at Duderhama, in Ganderbal, with an office at Shalimar in Srinagar. It has been grinding since 2012.
Tahoor
The name came before the business.
Tahoor is an Arabic word. It means pure — not purity as a state a thing happens to be in, but the act of making something pure. Water that cleans what it touches is tahoor.
It is a heavy word to put on a packet of chilli powder. That was rather the point. A name you have to live up to is a useful thing to own.
“Tahoor means pure. It is a promise before it is a name.”
2005–2012
2012
Ganderbal, Kashmir
A small grinding unit at Ganderbal.
Mohammad Maqbool spent seven years in the spice trade before he built anything of his own — buying, selling, learning where a spice is honest and where a shortcut hides. In 2012 he stopped selling other people's grinding and set up his own unit, on the Industrial Estate at Duderhama in Ganderbal, half an hour north of Srinagar. Not a warehouse and not an office — a room with machines in it, and people who knew what the spice was supposed to smell like coming out.
The office is in the city, at Chinar Chowk in Shalimar. That is where the post comes and where a wholesale conversation starts.
No spice has ever been ground there, and it is worth saying plainly which place is which. An FSSAI-licensed unit — Lic. No. 11019110000045 — thirty kilometres out, and a city office, is what a real food business looks like from the inside.
The decision that mattered was the dull one: grind it ourselves. We do not buy ground spice from anyone and put our name on it. Whole spice comes in, and it is not powder until it is our powder.
The method
Small batches, because a big batch has to be preserved.
Spice is at its best in the weeks after it is ground, and it goes quiet after that. A large batch has to sit somewhere while it sells, and things that sit need help — a colour to hold, a filler to stretch, something to keep it moving.
Grinding small removes the need for all of it. It is less efficient and it is the whole reason the packet tastes of anything.
The house
Part of the Murtaza Group.
Al Tahoor Spices is part of the Murtaza Group of Companies. That is a family, not a conglomerate — the sort of arrangement where the person whose name is on the licence is also the person you would meet at the unit.
It means the spice business is not answerable to a quarterly number. It can afford to grind small.
- Part of
- Murtaza Group of Companies
- Founder
- Mohammad Maqbool
- In the trade since
- 2005
Today
The same room, and a great deal more of India.
Kashmiri households, wazwan cooks and caterers have bought from the unit for years. What has changed is that a family in Chennai or Doha can now order the same packet from the same batch, and it arrives sealed with the date on it.
Nothing about the grinding has changed to make that possible. Only the parcel.
What we will not do
A short list, and it does not grow.
No artificial colour.
Kashmiri chilli is red on its own. Anything that makes it redder is covering for a chilli that could not.
No fillers.
No husk, no starch, no bran to make the weight. You are paying for spice, so it is spice.
Nothing ground for us.
Every packet is ground at our own unit. We have never put our name on someone else's powder.
No undated packs.
Batch number and packing date on every pack. If we are proud of how fresh it is, we should be willing to print it.
How each of those is actually done — sourcing, cleaning, grinding, sealing, dating — is set out on the purity page. Why it is worth choosing over the other kind of spice brand is on the why page.
The rest of the story is in the packet.
Ground this week at the unit, sealed, dated, and sent anywhere in India.