Nature Kitchen

Nature Kitchen is a spice merchant and world food shop in St Austell, at Biddicks Court, founded in 2009 by Ally and Antony Watkins. Step through the door and it opens out into a small emporium of herbs, spices and hard-to-find ingredients - the sort of ground turmeric, whole nutmeg or dried chilli you'd otherwise have to order online. Ally went on to build a side business training up independent 'spice merchants' around the UK, giving people a way to sell herbs and spices themselves at markets and events, which says something about how far the idea grew beyond the original shop.

The range runs to several hundred products: whole and ground spices, dried herbs, loose teas, olives, pickling spice and specialty world foods, sold loose or in bulk as well as packaged. Curated spice boxes built around a particular cuisine - Indian, Mexican, Thai, Mediterranean, Caribbean - come with recipe cards, and there are BBQ rubs and salt-and-pepper sets for home cooks who want to build a spice cupboard from scratch rather than buy one jar at a time.