Episode 6: Keith Alaniz (USA)

Keith Alaniz is the Co-Founder for Rumi Spice, a producer of high-quality, sustainably farmed saffron from Afghanistan. After graduating from Texas A&M, Keith was deployed twice to Iraq in 2007-2008 as a combat engineer– focused on finding and neutralizing IEDs. Keith talks about how his time at A&M helped shaped his leadership style in a theater of war, but also how he began to recognize that he didn’t fully understand the people or the culture he was trying to protect. So, he made the intentional decision to leave the traditional career path for an Army officer and participate in a specialized Afghan training program where he was equipped with economic, language, and cultural skills focused on rural Afghanistan.

It was directly because of these skills and the trust they built within the community that a local farmer approached Keith with the idea of growing and exporting saffron from Afghanistan to the international market. And the idea for Rumi Spice was born.

Listen as Keith describes a story of persistence, trial and error, and ultimately success as three former US Army officers built Rumi Spice into now the world’s largest exporter of saffron from Afghanistan. It involves knocking on countless doors, the creation of an e-commerce platform, an appearance on Shark Tank, and legitimizing a crop like saffron as an economic and sustainable alternative to poppy cultivation for Afghan farmers.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did!