The Bermondsey Spice Trader Turning Geopolitical Chaos Into a £4m Export Business

Priya Nair's warehouse on Enid Street in Bermondsey smells of turmeric and dried chilli. It also turns over roughly £4 million a year in exports to 14 countries, a figure that has doubled since 2023. Her company, Spice Corridor Ltd, buys direct from smallholder cooperatives in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, processes and repackages in SE1, and sells to food manufacturers across the Gulf, West Africa and Central Europe. The model is not complicated. The execution, in the current environment, very much is.

This week, with Iran's supreme leader being buried in Tehran and Moscow reporting fuel shortages that are rattling commodity markets, the fragility of the global trading order is impossible to ignore. Russian disruption in the Black Sea region has pushed freight costs on Eastern European routes up by around 18 percent since January, according to the Freight Transport Association's June index. Yet Nair's quarterly revenue for April to June came in at its highest ever. She attributes that partly to timing — she locked in 12-month shipping contracts with a Hamburg-based logistics firm last October, before the latest round of rate rises — and partly to relationships built over a decade of visiting markets in person rather than via Zoom.

Building the Network, Borough by Borough

Nair started the business in 2014 out of a railway arch in Peckham, buying small and selling to independent grocery retailers in Southwark and Lambeth. The pivot to export came after she joined the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry's Export Academy programme in 2019, a course that pairs early-stage exporters with experienced trade advisers for six months. She credits that programme, based at the Chamber's offices near St Paul's, with teaching her to read letters of credit properly. "Before that, I was essentially winging it on payment terms," she has said in previous interviews with the Chamber's own newsletter.

Her first international client was a food distributor in Accra, Ghana — a relationship that now accounts for around £600,000 in annual turnover. She expanded into the UAE in 2021, then Poland and the Czech Republic in 2023, partly because disruption to Ukrainian agricultural exports had left Central European food manufacturers scrambling for alternative spice suppliers. Poland, where the prime minister has been publicly warning this week of a deteriorating security environment, remains one of her fastest-growing markets despite, or arguably because of, that instability. Buyers there are diversifying supply chains aggressively.

Her London operations have grown accordingly. She moved from Peckham to the current Bermondsey site in 2022, taking a 5,000 square-foot unit on a seven-year lease at £28 per square foot — a rate she describes privately as having looked steep at the time but now looks prudent given industrial rents in SE1 have since risen above £35. She employs 11 full-time staff, eight of them from the local borough of Southwark, and uses the Food Innovation Centre at London South Bank University on Northampton Square for product development work.

What the Numbers Say About Small Exporters Like Her

Spice Corridor is not an outlier so much as a leading indicator. The Department for Business and Trade reported in March 2026 that SME goods exports from Greater London rose 9 percent in 2025, outpacing the national average of 5.4 percent. The strongest growth categories were processed foods, health products and specialist manufacturing — exactly the territory Nair occupies. UK Export Finance, which provides government-backed trade finance, says applications from London-based SMEs in the food and beverage sector rose 23 percent in the 12 months to April 2026.

The practical lesson from her trajectory is straightforward: the businesses benefiting most from the current disorder are those that invested in relationships and logistics infrastructure before the disruption peaked, not after. For London entrepreneurs considering export for the first time, the London Chamber's Export Academy runs its next cohort from September 2026, with applications open now. UK Export Finance offers a Smaller Exporter policy that covers credit risk on contracts from as low as £20,000. Nair's advice, passed on through the Chamber network, is blunt: go to the market physically at least once before you sign anything. The spice trade is old. Trust is still the oldest currency in it.