Preserving the Taste of Home Through Women’s Ingenuity

In kitchens across Ghana, the earthy aroma of dawadawa, the tang of turkey berries, and the woody fragrance of prekese whisper ancestral wisdom. These indigenous spices are more than ingredients, they are memory, medicine, and identity. But as modern food trends skew toward imported seasonings and synthetic cubes, Ghana’s traditional spices risk being erased from daily life. Preserving them is no longer an act of nostalgia; it is a defiant assertion of cultural sovereignty, nutritional resilience, and rural dignity.

At the heart of this culinary revolution are John Kwame Amissah and Dorinda Atuahee, a sibling duo whose journey weaves together food heritage, social enterprise, and women’s empowerment. Through their hard work, they are not only repackaging Ghana’s ancestral flavors into globally marketable products. They are restoring visibility and economic agency to the women who farm them.

Dorinda Atuahee and John Kwame Amissah are social entrepreneurs and advocates for indigenous food preservation, known for co-founding Best Siblings Company Limited, a startup that transforms Ghanaian spices like prekese, turkey berries, and dawadawa into ready-to-use powders. Their work bridges traditional knowledge with modern packaging to make local spices more accessible while promoting rural development. The siblings run biannual training programs for women farmers in the Upper West Region, focusing on digital literacy, sustainable farming, and market access. Through their growing spice line, John and Dorinda are advancing food heritage, women’s empowerment, and inclusive agribusiness in Ghana and beyond.

Healing Begins with Heritage

The genesis of the company is deeply personal. Dorinda’s entrepreneurial journey began not in a boardroom but in a moment of vulnerability.

“I had irregular menstrual flow and hormonal imbalance. One time I met an elderly woman who advised me to boil prekese with ginger and drink it. Within a few months, I saw a significant improvement,” she recalls.

A traditional remedy, once dismissed as primitive, became her turning point. As she embraced this simple yet potent heritage, questions surfaced:

Why have we forsaken the remedies that carried our grandmothers through births and sickness? Why must modernity demand the erasure of indigenous food? And who benefits from that forgetting?

What began as personal healing evolved into a broader mission. With her brother John, Dorinda produced her first prekese and ginger blend, followed by dawadawa powder and turkey berry spice. Although the company was founded in 2019, it took three years of trials, rejections, and redesigns before their full product line officially launched in 2022.

“My first sale didn’t go well because the packaging wasn’t attractive, and people didn’t trust that powdered spices could be as potent as raw ones,” Dorinda admits. But resilience, consistency, and community trust transformed skepticism into sales—and a small idea into a movement.

Spices as Culture: Reclaiming What’s Ours

For centuries, spices like prekese, dawadawa, and turkey berry were cornerstones of Ghanaian wellness and cuisine. But the women who cultivate and process them remain largely invisible,underpaid, untrained, and undervalued.

“These women are the foundation of our food culture,” Dorinda asserts. “Yet they remain at the margins of the value chain.”

That injustice hits close to home. Raised by a single mother in a rural village, John and Dorinda witnessed firsthand the systemic neglect of rural women.

“We sometimes didn’t know where the next meal would come from. That background shaped our drive to support women like our mother,” John says.

Today, they source directly from women farmers in the Upper West Region, ensuring fair pay and stable income. They also conduct biannual training programs, focusing on sustainable farming, digital literacy, and small-business skills, bridging the gap between indigenous knowledge and global markets.

“We divide women into age groups of about 30 to 35, and train selected women to interpret for others in local languages,” John explains. “We teach them how to document their farming activities, use mobile phones, and present themselves professionally.”

Women like Gloria Klenam, 25, are proof of impact.

“Before joining, I didn’t know anything about spices. Now I can make them, package them, and even teach others. I feel more independent and prouder of myself,” she says.

To date, over 1,000 women have been trained, not as recipients of charity, but as stewards of an intergenerational legacy.

Overcoming the Odds

The siblings’ mission is not one of rescue but of restoration—returning women to their rightful place as custodians of culinary wisdom and as active participants in modern markets.

But growth has not come easily.

“We couldn’t afford research center fees. Dehydrating Aiden fruit alone takes 8–10 hours, and they charged 90 cedis per hour,” Dorinda recounts.

They improvised borrowing, bartering, and learning on the go. Every setback built grit. Today, their products are stocked in Ghana, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with diaspora platforms eager for clean, authentic, African spice blends.

A Taste for Tomorrow

Looking ahead, John and Dorinda dream of scaling impact without losing authenticity. Their roadmap includes: dedicated farms for prekese, dawadawa, and ginger to ensure organic supply, expansion into 20 international markets, more training programs for women in agribusiness and digital marketing.

They are also developing partnerships to promote Ghanaian spices as climate-smart, health-forward, and culturally rooted alternatives to mass-produced seasonings.

“We want people to know that choosing local isn’t just patriotic,” John says. “It’s healthier, more sustainable, and economically transformative.”

Conclusion: From Forgotten Spice to Global Shelf

Dorinda and John are not just packaging spices, they are preserving stories, livelihoods, and legacy. In every jar of their powdered blends lies a simple truth: what we choose to eat, and who we choose to empower in the process, determines the kind of future we build.

Through their work, they remind us that indigenous knowledge is not obsolete, it is overlooked. And that the women who stir the pots of tradition are not relics of the past, but pioneers of a better, bolder future.