India, Feb. 24 -- India grows 60 of the 109 spices recognised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and shipped out $4.45 Bn worth of spices in FY25, anchoring a global market projected to reach $34.31 Bn by 2030. Yet for all that scale, the export story is still held together by an old operating system: fragmented sourcing, layers of middlemen, and processing that often sits far from where the crop is grown.

That complexity was tolerable when buyers were willing to accept paperwork and broad assurances. It is far less workable now. As regulation tightens in markets such as the EU and the US, importers increasingly want batch-level traceability, not just where a spice was sourced, but how it was processed, tested a...