Spice Scientist
Ask Darby McLean about her childhood in Cheney, and you’ll hear her wax enthusiastic about the subtle beauty of its college-town setting, its quiet charm and its strong sense of community. How it was the kind of place where a kid could bike its streets without a care in the world. About how it pulsed with the energies and ambitions of very bright people, both young and old.
What you won’t hear her talk about are spices. At least not in the ways you might expect. McLean ’00 runs Spiceology, a Spokane-based purveyor of bespoke blends that has, seemingly overnight, set the nation’s spice scene on fire. Her company’s products, instantly identifiable thanks to their eye-catching “periodic table of flavors” design, are seemingly everywhere. They’re in grocery stores, both plain and fancy. On the sets of food shows and culinary competitions. In ads for ritzy kitchen remodels. And, of course, in the TikToks and Instagrams of food-obsessed cooking fans. They’ve even made a surprise appearance during last year’s Super Bowl — this thanks to an unsolicited placement in a Fox promo for the latest Gordon Ramsey-hosted chef spectacle.
Back in Cheney, none of this would have entered even the wildest imaginings of the younger McLean. In her mother’s kitchen, she recalls, spices were, at best, an afterthought.
“My mom was a middle school counselor for close to 30 years,” McLean says. “She cooked all the time, which was impressive for someone with a career. But I think she suffered from the exact reason why our spice company exists today — spices become boring and stale by the time they get to consumers.” (And perhaps even after they reach consumers. Not that any of us would leave our spice jars neatly arranged and mostly untouched for years at a time, only to wonder why they fall flat in that special dish.)
Freshness is a big point of emphasis at Spiceology, but it’s just one of the features that has fed the company’s rapid rise. Just as important is its novel — some might suggest audacious — approach to blending.
Celebrity chefs notwithstanding, it’s moments with folks like her mom, curious but spice-challenged consumers, that get McLean super excited. “It’s really fun,” she says, “to see people try our fresh spices and have their eyes light up when they realize that, ‘Wow, you can actually taste the difference!’”
Freshness is a big point of emphasis at Spiceology, but it’s just one of the features that has fed the company’s rapid rise. Just as important is its novel — some might suggest audacious — approach to blending.
Mixing spices is as old as cooking itself. Archaeological evidence has shown the Egyptians, for example, were blending as early as 3,500 BCE, using cumin and coriander, along with anise and fenugreek to enhance the savor of stews, breads and vegetable dishes. Cooks and traders in China and India were also building blends in the same era; spice combinations that, over the centuries, became foundational to culinary tastes and food-prep experiences of cultures across the globe.
At Spiceology, such time-honored flavor combinations are merely a launching point, an invitation to innovation. When it comes to mixing and matching, pretty much nothing is off the table. Unexpected combinations like Raspberry Chipotle and Black and Blue (blue cheese with blackening seasoning) comprise the norm. Versatility and flexible flavor profiles are the goal. “You can put Raspberry Chipotle on ribs, add a couple tablespoons to your brownie mix, or shake it on popcorn,” McLean says. “Black and Blue is amazing on steak, but mix it into a box of mac and cheese, and the whole thing’s upleveled. You could serve it to guests at dinner, and nobody would know it came from a box.”
Hence the “light bulb” moments when home cooks “taste the difference.” Even professional chefs, who now make up close to half of Spiceology’s rapidly growing food-service business, favor the company’s blends alongside traditional single-ingredient spices.
Like her company’s unique products, McLean’s route to Spiceology doesn’t follow the familiar path. A microbiologist by training, she spent almost two decades successfully working in biotech — a career choice for which she largely credits her time as an undergraduate at Eastern.
Even well before college, however, McLean knew science would be her thing. She remembers it was a middle school project working with fruit flies that “got me really fascinated with the concept of genetics.” After high school, she says, friends and family figured she’d head up the street to EWU, precisely the kind of place that could provide her with the undergraduate research experiences she was looking for.
But McLean instead decided on a different direction, traversing the Cascades to attend Seattle’s Bellevue College. “I had an itch to have other experiences, like many young people do,” she says. “I played softball at Bellevue, a community college at the time. I was a lefty pitcher and had a great couple of years there.”
Still, she says, in spite of the many West Side higher-ed options, a return to Cheney was never far from her mind. EWU wasn’t just close to home, McLean says, it offered something unique.
“Eastern had one of the only biotechnology areas of study west of the Mississippi River,” she says. “And I knew it was a place where I would be able to do bench-science research as an undergrad, which is completely different from what you’d be able to do at a larger university like UW.”
In spite of the many Westside higher-ed options, a return to Cheney was never far from her mind. EWU wasn’t just close to home, McLean says, it offered something unique.
And so McLean became an Eag, where she found the intimacy of Eastern’s biotech program, and the readiness of even senior scientists to work directly with undergraduates, to be transformative. She laughs now as she recalls her ravenous appetite for acquiring knowledge: “I had an insatiable thirst for learning, and I still do. That’s a core part of my personality. Always learning.”
She adds that faculty members such as Don and Haideh Lightfoot were particularly instrumental in encouraging this youthful hunger for knowledge. “Haideh was in the microbiology program, and Don was part of the biotech program. I worked closely with both of them. The size of the programs at EWU helped — you can’t have a close relationship if there are 100 people in the class. I got to know Don and Haideh very well. They even invited me and other students to their house for dinner.”
Soon the Lightfoot’s were more than just influential instructors. They became research collaborators who were eager to include McLean in something bigger.
That “something bigger” was the Lightfoots’ idea for commercializing a new technology developed by a student in Don’s program, one that made possible more efficient forms of rapid microbiological analysis. Along with their EWU colleague Jim Fleming, an adjunct professor of biology who had worked for NASA and the Linus Pauling Institute, the group approached the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute for seed funding. They got a green light, and soon their proposed start-up, GenPrime, was open for business. McLean, still an EWU undergrad, was one of their first hires.
“Our first products were in food science,” says McLean. “These were methods for rapidly enumerating, or counting, bacteria. Our niche was applications outside of heavily regulated industries like medicine; those turned out to be in the fermentation industry, especially cheesemaking and brewing. What a fun job as a college student to be eating cheese, drinking beer and doing science!”
After graduation, McLean began working for GenPrime full time. She says it was a great gig, one that allowed her to pick up a range of valuable skills. It wasn’t long before history intervened and her skill set, by necessity, grew even larger.
“September 11th happened,” McLean says. “And right after that came the anthrax attacks.”
Suddenly, government agencies urgently needed technology to quickly detect biological threats. Turns out GenPrime’s food-science applications could be adapted to do just that. “With some minor adjustments to the underlying technology,” says McLean. “we became one of a handful of devices in the world that could be used as a point-of-detection device for police, fire and hazmat agencies.”
Thus the company pivoted into government and military sales. McLean, ever the insatiable learner, soon found herself absorbing the intricacies of procurement, product development and supply chains. “It was a terrible event, but great timing for us,” she says.
McLean followed up her success at GenPrime with five years of navigating FDA clearances for Abbott Labs and Labcorp. Her career trajectory seemed set. “I was at a place where I really knew what the next five years of my life would look like,” she says. “That wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t super exciting. And I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to learn anything new by doing that.”
That’s when she encountered a fledgling spice company called Spiceology. Founded by local chef Pete Taylor and food blogger Heather Scholten, the two started offering blends in area farmers’ markets just over 10 years ago. Their mission? Disrupting “a stale spice and seasoning market” while helping cooks “bring an extra dose of magic to their cooking.” Taylor was the tastemaker. His first blend, Smoky Honey Habanero, put Spiceology on the map, the company says, “with its smoky-sweet heat that brightens every dish.” (It’s still Spiceology’s biggest seller). Scholten, one of the nation’s most followed food bloggers, brought social media expertise and storytelling skills.
McLean, who over the years had made a point of staying connected to Spokane’s entrepreneurial scene, says she had first seen Taylor and Scholten doing local “pitch competitions.” She was intrigued. “They were getting really good traction, but struggling to scale,” McLean says. “All the operational procedures and efficiency gains they needed were things I thought I could help with.”
Before long McLean was all in. She officially joined the company in 2020 as its vice president of channels and distribution. When her boss retired two years later, she succeeded him as CEO. It’s since been a bit of a wild ride, she says, one supercharged by culinary media, with Spiceology products appearing regularly on shows like Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef. “Growing from $1 million to $2 million is hard. Going from $2 million to $5 million is hard. Growing from $5 million to $10 million – oh my gosh — every level presents challenges,” she says.
During a conversation held over the hum of the canning line in Spiceology’s 45,000 square-foot facility, McLean, dressed for the occasion in an Eagle-red blazer, expands on the scope of that growth. Back when she came on board, she says, there were just over 30 employees. Today there are 84. When Spiceology moved to their current location in the months just after the pandemic, the cavernous space seemed like it might never be filled. Now, 25-foot-high rows of product and packaging stretch from end-to-end, bottom to top. Other areas hold 18-wheeler friendly skids of ready-to-ship spices and blends bound for retail outlets like Costco, e-commerce customers ($10 million in sales through this channel alone), and, of course, larger restaurant operators and their distributors.
McLean brought characteristic precision to managing all this, introducing Six Sigma processes that transformed operations. The Six Sigma approach, pioneered by Motorola in the 1980s, is a set of tools and techniques for minimizing manufacturing “defects” by reducing processing variabilities — think of it as a high-tech analog to Henry Ford’s assembly lines. At Spiceology, Six Sigma translates into helping employees do their jobs with accuracy and efficiency. McLean credits Bryce Burchak, now vice president of operations, and fellow Eastern graduate Ned Woodward ’10, the company’s director of logistics and fulfillment, with making it happen. Woodward, in particular, has been “a pretty big reason why the company is so effectively growing,” she says.
For his part, Woodward says, it’s McLean’s leadership, and the managers and creative talent she’s assembled, that makes it all come together. “Takes a village,” he says.
What’s next for McLean and Spiceology? With characteristic passion, McLean says job one is keeping the company at the forefront of culinary trends. Her team of working culinary pros, led by Tony Reed, is continually engaging with consumers, chefs and the wider restaurant community to identify emerging flavor preferences.
“We’re not just asking questions about trends, we’re helping to decide what those trends will be,” she says, adding that their latest data on trends points to global flavors that tap into foodies yearning for cross-cultural comfort foods — think Korean barbecue chicken instead of buffalo chicken.
Through it all, McLean leans on her background in science for both grounding and inspiration. It’s a background that also leads her back to her roots in Cheney and at Eastern, where she is intent on helping today’s students have some of opportunities she did. She serves, for example, as chair of the College of STEM’s Advisory board, and will become a member of the EWU Foundation Board next year. She has also connected with other Eagle-run companies in Eastern’s Alumni Business Directory (ewu.edu/alumni/directory).
“I love this business and am excited by it, which I think comes through in our products,” McLean says. “I’m passionate about what I’m doing. Just like I was back there at Eastern.”
— Story by Charles E. Reineke
