In 2012, Ethan Frisch was working for a development organization in Afghanistan when he saw a vendor selling wild cumin at a local market.

“I thought I knew my way around spices,” said Mr. Frisch, 38, recalling his experience at the market in Badakhshan Province. “But I had never tasted anything like this.”

Mr. Frisch had worked as a cook in London, where he attended graduate school for international development, and in New York, including time at Tabla, the fine-dining Indian restaurant by the chef Floyd Cardoz and the restaurateur Danny Meyer. He started bringing bags of cumin home to New York to share with friends in the restaurant industry, garnering rave reviews with each taste. He realized that there was a market for spices sourced directly from farmers.

In 2016, he started Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company, with his friend Ori Zohar. The two had collaborated years earlier on Guerrilla Ice Cream, a roving ice cream cart that served flavors inspired by political and activist movements. Mr. Zohar came from a business background, working in marketing and advertising, and helped found a tech start-up that shut down in 2017.

Mr. Frisch put his life savings — about $20,000 — into starting the business. He ran it out of his one-bedroom apartment in Queens, cold-calling restaurants and showing up to kitchens with a backpack full of spices to give chefs a taste. He built up a base of spice suppliers, using skills and connections he developed while working with the Aga Khan Foundation on rural infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, and doing logistics for Doctors Without Borders in Jordan.

For years, Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar flew overseas to stock up on inventory, returning with duffel bags full of cardamom, cumin, nutmeg and more. They would bring back enough spices to “fund the cost of the trip,” Mr. Frisch said. (“I had some funny conversations with the customs officers,” he added.)

In 2019, Burlap & Barrel embarked on its first chef collaboration: a line of masala spice blends with Mr. Cardoz.

After Mr. Cardoz died from Covid-19 in March 2020, his wife, Barkha Cardoz, continued to work with Burlap & Barrel, releasing the blends in October 2020, in honor of what would have been Mr. Cardoz’s 60th birthday. The company received more than a thousand orders that day — its biggest day of sales at that time.

The founders realized that there was “a way to connect a home-cook audience to a chef, through a spice blend,” Mr. Frisch said, and collaborations became a core part of their business. Amid the early months of the pandemic, Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar saw an increase in orders as more people made their meals at home.

In April 2023, another breakthrough moment came when they appeared on the reality TV show “Shark Tank.”

“It almost doesn’t even taste like conventional cinnamon — I mean, it’s, like, incomparable,” Gwyneth Paltrow, a guest “Shark,” said after trying the brand’s Royal Cinnamon variety from Vietnam.

Mr. Frisch and Mr. Zohar didn’t end up with a deal, but they gained publicity and a surge of new customers. In 2024, the company did about $9 million in sales, according to Mr. Frisch.

Over the years, they have collaborated with chefs including Marc Murphy; Ashleigh Shanti; Sohla and Ham El-Waylly, who are New York Times contributors; and the fashion designer and cookbook author Peter Som. Recently, they teamed up with Martha Stewart on a poultry seasoning, and with Jane Goodall on jars of honey from the Miombo woodlands of Tanzania.

Now, more than eight years later, what began as a scrappy passion project is a growing brand and social enterprise with big-name collaborations, home-cook devotees, celebrity fans and cameos in the background of the FX show “The Bear.”

The chefs Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate, founders of Honeysuckle Provisions, an Afrocentric grocery and cafe in West Philadelphia that was named one of Eater’s best new restaurants of 2023, collaborated with Burlap & Barrel. They wanted to work with them, Mr. Tate said, both because of the sheer flavor of the spices, and because of their ethical and intentional approach to working with farmers.

“They make sure that the communities that they are sourcing from are respected — not just through the ingredients that are being extracted and that they’re exporting to make these profits, but they’re also redistributing that wealth to the community,” Mr. Tate said.

At Hani’s Bakery and Cafe in Lower Manhattan — a new spot from Miro Uskokovic, the former Gramercy Tavern pastry chef, and his wife, Shilpa Uskokovic, an editor at Bon Appétit — Burlap & Barrel’s Royal Cinnamon is used in their popular malted cinnamon buns.

The cinnamon “is the only one we’ve found that offers the right combination of strength and florality to stand up to all that cream cheese and butter,” Mr. Uskokovic wrote in an email.

“As a chef, the one thing that we have always lacked is any kind of traceability or any kind of transparency in spices, in herbs,” said Rick Bayless, the celebrated Chicago chef and restaurateur who specializes in Mexican cuisine. “When I found Burlap & Barrel, I wanted to get to know these guys and see what they were doing, because they were telling stories about who grew this cumin and who grew these peppercorns.”

Transparency and storytelling is at the heart of the business. As what’s known as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit company that focuses on contributing to a social good — Burlap & Barrel seeks “to connect smallholder farmers to high-value markets,” said Mr. Zohar, 39.

“Our business works because we’re paying the farmers more, which then allows the farmers to not just grow the spices, but they clean the spices, they dry the spices, they grind the spices, they prepare them for export,” he said.

The company now consists of 20 people, most of whom are contractors, and works with farmers in about 30 countries including Vietnam, Turkey and Guatemala, often helping with the logistics of the export process. The founders visit farms to meet the farmers and see firsthand the practices and products of each potential partner.

Shadel Nyack Compton, the owner and managing director of Belmont Estate, a family farm and tourist destination in Grenada, works with Burlap & Barrel to sell nutmeg and bay leaves. The farm — whose main crop is cocoa — has been in her family for 80 years.

In 2021, Ms. Nyack Compton found Burlap & Barrel online. She was looking for new business and wanted to work with a company that was interested in developing a relationship with farmers. “We want our story to be told,” she said.

“Spices represent a lot to a lot of different people,” Mr. Frisch said. “A spice jar becomes a way to tell a story, to evoke a memory, to teach about a culture or a cuisine, to give someone the opportunity to do their own cooking in a different way.”

Burlap & Barrel is unique, Ms. Nyack Compton said, because the company works to “establish this kind of equitable, transparent supply chain,” an approach she said is more often seen in the cocoa and chocolate space. With spices, she said, “it’s very novel.”

Some shoes we simply wear. Others, we debate endlessly.

New Balance’s mutant 1906L is clearly in the latter category. Introduced last year, New Balance’s shoe is a mash-up of a sneaker and a loafer, christened the “Snoafer” by the internet. It’s a mutt-like design caught in the liminal space between informal and formal.

Whatever else the Snoafer may be, it has been polarizing. Versions of the shoes keep selling out (though how many have been produced is unclear), yet detractors say that the Snoafer is just plain ugly.

In an edited conversation, Jon Caramanica, Stella Bugbee and Jacob Gallagher, three members of The New York Times staff (two of whom actually purchased the Snoafers) discuss the shoe’s Frankensteinian merits, how it has been received by their respective family members and if it’s actually ugly enough.

STELLA BUGBEE There’s something profoundly perverse about these shoes.

JACOB GALLAGHER I could see someone saying that they don’t go together in an orange juice and toothpaste sort of way, but perverse? Say more.

BUGBEE They don’t know what they want to be, and yet they are unapologetically themselves. That tension produces an uncomfortable feeling in me — in a good way, I think.

GALLAGHER I felt that way a bit when I saw them online, but when I put them on after buying them and looked down, I thought, “Oh, is that all there is?”

JON CARAMANICA Seeing them, I immediately thought of, say, vintage Geox shoes — the sort of brand you might see in a print ad deep into the cheap pages of a men’s magazine. Or even worse, those terrible attempts at athletic office footwear from Cole Haan. We all hate those things.

GALLAGHER You’re talking about Cole Haan’s LunarGrands, which were a monstrosity. They called attention to their juxtapositions. The upper was dressy, while the sole, which was often neon, was not just informal, but futuristic. Or so Cole Haan wanted you to think. The 1906Ls though, meld. They’re like the creature at the end of “The Substance.” They takes two distinct halves and distort them into one uncanny whole.

BUGBEE The reaction I got when I posted pictures of the 1906Ls on Instagram was overwhelmingly negative, which only made me think that they were cooler. If everybody hates a thing, it must be doing something right?

GALLAGHER But to go back to your earlier point, Stella. Do you think people thought they were perverse or merely ugly? Are people reacting to this shoe because it’s new or because they find it unappealing? That’s an important distinction.

BUGBEE I can’t tell. I don’t think the 1906Ls are ugly, but that was the consensus from my friends and family.

CARAMANICA My counterpoint is that they are not ugly enough! The black pair especially.

GALLAGHER I’m with Jon here. They’re not ugly. They’re definitely not in the category of Jon’s beloved Balenciaga Triple S, a sneaker that knowingly bonked itself on every branch of the ugly tree.

BUGBEE People especially hated the tiny “N” on the top.

CARAMANICA That’s funny about the “N” — that’s the gesture on this shoe that feels maybe a touch radical? Like some intersection of a $3 pair of “breathable sock shoes” you’d find on Temu and the very long tail of Virgil Abloh’s sense of play with text on clothing.

GALLAGHER The “N” might be the riskiest thing on the shoe! Who puts a logo there? That to me is part of the appeal. They’re giving something new to a hype consumer (after all, they keep selling out) while knowingly dipping into geriatric territory.

CARAMANICA Can I offer two more reference points for shoes that tried to walk this tightrope before? First, my beloved Jordan Two3 Cavvy from the early 2000s, which is essentially a Prada loafer with an athletic tilting sole and an accentuated elastic top. A messy blend of casual and formal. And second is the Nike Air Verdana, a golf shoe, also from the early 2000s.

In their day, I disliked both of these. But at least on the Cavvy, I have come around to its elegance. Which is to say, maybe the 1906L will just need two decades to be normalized and appreciated.

BUGBEE I put them more in the category of the Nike Air Rift Tabis — sneakers with mutant ambitions.

CARAMANICA Yes, but the Rifts don’t pretend to any kind of formality.

BUGBEE The 1906Ls do not feel formal to me. They retain their sneakerness.

CARAMANICA Then it sounds like what you want is … a sneaker?

BUGBEE No, I wanted a comfy slip-on, with the shape of a loafer and the sole of a sneaker that would make my whole family want to walk 10 feet away from me in public.

GALLAGHER So you wanted the repulsion?

BUGBEE Yeah, I like a little troll.