What Price spice

This is the only time of year most people buy spices. Holiday baking beckons and they respond. A quick trip to the supermarket and they’re set.

But what’s this? Ground cloves at more than $9 for the smallest container, cinnamon $2.75, dried ginger $3.50 and nutmeg $4.50?

If you’re not careful, you could spend more on the spices for your pumpkin pie than you do for your turkey.

On the other hand, you could pay only the barest fraction of that price. There are few things on earth that are as wildly variable as the price of spice.

Consider: Those cloves that go for the equivalent of $8.30 an ounce can be found for as little as 37 cents an ounce if you’re willing to buy in bulk through the mail from a chef’s supply house. That’s a price difference of more than 2,000% for what is essentially the same product.

The only other difference between the two is convenience. To realize the greatest savings, you would have to order the spices by mail in 1-pound bags and meet the minimum order of $30 (at other mail-order houses the size and minimum order are much friendlier to the home cook, but the savings aren’t quite as great).

While the price difference is extreme for cloves, it applies to other spices as well. Checking around various sources this week, prices per ounce for ground cinnamon range from 23 cents to $3.17. Nutmeg goes from 52 cents to $4.26; allspice from 42 cents to $4.07.

In between supermarkets and mail-order are a wide range of options for the smart shopper. Buying in bulk from a discount supermarket or a health food store can result in prices nearly as low as mail order. So can a trip to Little India in Artesia.

A couple of local stores also specialize in spices. All Spice, a 6-month-old store on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, sells cloves starting at 75 cents an ounce and cinnamon starting at $1 an ounce. At Herb Products Co. in North Hollywood, cloves are about 90 cents an ounce and cinnamon is about 50 cents an ounce.

McCormick, the giant company that controls more than 40% of the retail spice trade in the United States, says you should be happy to pay more for their product because the company stands behind them.

“It’s not the brand, it’s what’s behind the brand,” says spokeswoman Connie Jones. “Our standards are really very high.

“When you buy from us, you know where it’s coming from. You’re getting the very best quality and everything is cleaned up and standardized and everything else. When you’re talking about mail order, who knows what you’re getting?”

To find out, we ordered ground cloves and cinnamon from two different mail-order suppliers.

The first, San Francisco Herb Co., is intended primarily for people who buy spices in bulk--chefs and other retail outlets. Many of its products are available only in minimum 1-pound orders (the equivalent to roughly 16 normal containers of powdered cloves--in other words, enough cloves for everyone on the block).

The second, Penzey’s Spices, is much more user-friendly. Its spices come in an entire range of sizes. And for the spice freak, there’s nothing like its catalog. Want cinnamon? You can not only choose between ground and stick (and what size stick), but from five different varieties as well: Korintje, Ceylon, Cassia, China Cassia or Vietnamese Cassia.

During a sampling in the Times Test Kitchen, it was difficult to tell mail-order spices from the supermarket brands. If anything, the mail-order spices were slightly more pungent, perhaps because they had the advantage of being extremely fresh. Those ordered from Penzey’s, in particular, had a racy depth of flavor.

Bill Penzey started his Wisconsin-based spice catalog company in 1987. Now there are five retail stores as well, mostly in the Midwest. He says the difference in price between his stock and that in the supermarket comes down to economic realities.

“Basically what you’ve got on high end [of the prices] is a lot of different things,” he says, including convenience, packaging and marketing.

Competition is a problem, too, he says. McCormick so dominates the supermarket spice trade that there really isn’t much.

In most markets, you have a choice between two McCormick brands (the green-topped glass jars, which are its high end, and the red-topped plastic containers) and Spice Islands, a part of the conglomerate Burns Phillip Food Inc., which also includes Durkee and French’s.

McCormick tried to buy Spice Islands in 1988 but dropped the bid after the Federal Trade Commission complained that it would dangerously reduce competition.

“It seems like when they won the supermarket wars, there weren’t a lot of people pushing them,” Penzey says. “It’s tough to bring those prices down. Spices are a fairly profitable item for them.”

All Spice: 507 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 782-1893).

Herb Products Co.: 11012 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. (818) 761-0351. https://www.herbproducts.com

Penzey’s Spices: (800) 747-7787. https://www.penzeys.com

San Francisco Herb Co.: (800) 227-4530. https://www.sfherb.com