A hardware merchant from Cuba, a tiny shop and spices packed by hand.

Badia is an American brand of spices, herbs and seasoning blends, made by Badia Spices of Doral, Florida, in Miami-Dade County. It began as a family business in Miami’s Cuban community. The fullest dated account of its early years is a long profile by Joseph A. Mann Jr. in the Miami Herald’s Business Monday section, published on 20 July 2014, built around an interview with the founder’s son, Joseph “Pepe” Badía, then the company’s president.

The Herald traced the company to the wave of Cubans who left the island after Fidel Castro took power. Pepe, it said, was sent to Miami in 1960 and then to New Jersey to live with friends and family. His parents, José and Azucena, arrived in Miami later, and the family moved for a time to Puerto Rico.

The business itself started in 1967. According to the Herald, the elder Badía, who had been in the hardware business in Cuba, began a new career in Miami in a tiny store at the corner of Southwest First Street and 22nd Avenue, the original Badia Spices. There he packaged garlic, pepper and vanilla among other spices and sold them to bodegas around the city. English Wikipedia places that first shop in Little Havana and names the founder as José Badía; the company’s own site gives the same year and founder.

The work was manual. The Herald said that Pepe, working part time, helped his father mix and package spices by hand. In 1970, when his father needed a full-time employee to help run daily operations, he offered the job to his son, who had just finished a stint in the U.S. Army. Pepe told the paper that the business was very small, but that as the Cuban community in Miami grew, so did the company.

Father and son ran it together for a quarter of a century. The Herald reported that they worked together closely until José Badía’s death in 1995. Even after the company bought its first mechanical packaging equipment, the paper said, Pepe kept arriving before dawn to mix and package spices for delivery, and he described having done every job in the business, from filling bottles to driving trucks.

The family name and the brand name are spelled differently. The Herald noted that the family name carries an accent, Badía, while the company name does not: the family is Badía, the brand is Badia.

Sedano’s, Publix, Puerto Rico, New Jersey and new investors.

The brand’s first customers were small shops. The Herald said that in the late 1960s and 1970s Pepe concentrated on widening the customer base among bodegas, filling containers late into the night and delivering spices, chorizo and even brooms from his station wagon during the day.

Supermarkets followed. José Herrán Jr., chief operating officer of the Hispanic supermarket chain Sedano’s, told the Herald that Sedano’s began selling Badia products around 1970, with its second or third store, and that it first carried small pouches and blends, which customers sent back to Cuba as care packages. Publix began carrying Badia in 1989, a Publix spokesperson told the paper, first in a store in Miami Lakes.

The brand moved outward from Miami in steps. The Herald said Badia launched in Puerto Rico in 1985, in Winn-Dixie supermarkets and other outlets, its first foray outside Florida; later in the decade it sold to Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire and to other markets in the Caribbean and Latin America. From 1990 it expanded to the Tampa Bay area and Atlanta, sold Mexican chiles and spices in Texas, and reached the New York and New Jersey area through Wakefern Food Corp., the cooperative behind ShopRite and PriceRite stores. The paper also told how Badia reached Ghana after a visitor from there tasted a chicken cooked with its complete seasoning in New Jersey and contacted the company. “I didn’t go to Ghana — Ghana came to me,” Pepe said.

Production stayed in South Florida. English Wikipedia says the spices are manufactured in Doral, where the company keeps its headquarters, and the Herald described Pepe giving his interview inside the Doral production facility, among shelves of bagged garlic and pepper. The raw materials come from further away: the paper said most of Badia’s spices are imported because many are not grown in the United States, with China, India, Vietnam and Sri Lanka among the major suppliers.

Ownership changed in 2024. Just Food, in a report by Andy Coyne dated 3 October 2024, said the news agency Reuters had reported a majority stake sale to Bia Foods, a Panama-based investor set up by the food and beverage group Grupo Mariposa in 2017, and to BDT & MSD Partners. In a statement to Just Food, Bia Foods said it and funds affiliated with BDT & MSD Partners had agreed to enter a strategic partnership with the Badía family, subject to customary closing conditions, and confirmed that Pepe Badía would remain a shareholder and become honorary chairman. The company’s website now carries a copyright line in the name of Badia Spices, LLC.

Design and documentation.

Spice jars, seasoning shakers and boxed potato pouches share a problem: the product inside is a dry powder, a blend or a flake that looks much the same from one maker to the next, so much of what a shopper sees on the shelf has to be carried by the container and its label. A cap colour, the shape of a tin, a band of type across a carton or a pouch that stands upright can do more work than any description of the contents.

Many of these packs are long-lived. A jar or carton may keep its basic form for decades while the company behind the name changes owners, moves its plants or widens its range far beyond the product it began with. That makes the plain questions worth asking of each name: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spices, blends or potatoes are actually grown, milled and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Bilingual labels, a seasoning for everything and advertising tied to charity.

A Badia label speaks two languages. The Miami Herald reported in 2014 that the company’s packaged products are labelled in English and Spanish. The brand name itself is written without the accent the family uses.

The products that carry that label are everyday kitchen staples. Nicole Krauss of Publix’s Miami division named the Badia products that sold well in its stores as mojo marinade, garlic powder, complete seasoning, known in Spanish as sazón completa, and minced garlic in oil. She said that at the time Publix first stocked the brand, only stores in Hispanic neighbourhoods carried the product, and that bringing it to Publix let the chain serve a more diverse customer base.

The range reaches beyond the spice rack. Pepe Badía told the Herald, “We’re not just a spice company,” listing olive oil, hearts of palm, sauces, coconut water, tea and nuts among its other goods. Badia’s website today sorts its products into categories including spices and herbs, seasoning blends, sauces and marinades, chili pods, garlic, teas and a Hispanic pantry, and the company says it manufactures, packages and distributes them itself.

The brand has not relied on heavy broadcast advertising. The Herald said that the little television and radio advertising the company did was usually linked to its charitable work, and that Badia donated a share of sales of some products to charities including the Dan Marino Foundation and the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Both organisations are still listed as partners on the company’s website.

The company’s own description of itself is short. Its website says Badia Spices was established in 1967 by Jose Badia, and presents it as a Hispanic food company selling in many countries. That opening line, a founder’s name and a year, is the same story the Herald told at length a decade earlier, from a corner shop on Southwest First Street to a production centre in Doral.

For a design guide, Badia shows how a grocery brand can be built for two audiences at once: a bilingual label, a name kept close to the family’s own and a range rooted in the flavours of Miami’s Latin American kitchens. Compare it with Goya and McCormick. For this guide we use chili red, saffron yellow and garlic cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Badia’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.