Charles Tanner
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Charles Tanner has never held a job he was qualified for on paper, which he says is the secret to his career. He left college after three semesters, taught himself to program from a stack of library books and a secondhand laptop, and learned the spice trade by unloading containers of black pepper at a Port Newark warehouse because it was the only place hiring that week. He stayed in spices because, as he puts it, "nothing else smells this good at six in the morning."
By the time he founded Spice Admiral in 2011, Tanner had spent a decade at that Port Newark warehouse working every job in the building, from forklift driver to buyer, while teaching himself statistics, agronomy, maritime logistics and food microbiology on nights and weekends. The price and yield model that grew into HELM was written on that same secondhand laptop, during a cardamom season that nearly put the young company out of business. "I was too stubborn to lose and too broke to hire anyone, so I wrote it myself," he says.
Part Trader, Part Engineer, Part Weather Vane
Colleagues describe Tanner as a man who thinks sideways and acts quickly. He arrives at origin visits with a notebook full of questions no one has asked the growers before. His office wall holds a labeled jar from every black pepper lot the company has ever imported, more than a thousand of them, and he can tell you the crop year of most by smell. Every server in the HELM cluster is named after a historical ship's captain, and he insists on explaining why each name fits.
He has delivered industry talks on machine learning while wearing a necktie printed with turmeric fingers. He once settled an argument about cassia volatile oil by building a steam distillation rig from a pressure cooker and a length of copper tubing in the company kitchen. It worked, and the quality laboratory still keeps it on a shelf as a reminder that the right answer does not care what it was measured with.
Beneath the eccentricity is a serious conviction: that an ancient trade deserves modern tools, and that the people who have spent their lives in it deserve better information than a telephone and a hunch. Every part of HELM, from crop forecasting to the inspection lines, began as a Tanner sketch on a whiteboard and a flat refusal to accept "this is how it has always been done" as an answer.
"Every jar of spice is a weather report, a shipping manifest and a chemistry experiment that happens to taste good. I never found anything else that interesting, so I stopped looking."
Charles Tanner
Quick Facts
| Title | Founder and Chief Executive Officer |
|---|---|
| With Spice Admiral | Since founding the company in 2011 |
| Formal education | Three semesters of college and a forklift certification |
| Self-taught in | Programming, statistics, agronomy, maritime logistics, food microbiology and, most recently, Vietnamese |
| First job in spices | Unloading black pepper containers at a Port Newark warehouse |
| Favorite spice | Tellicherry black pepper, "because it argues back" |
| Desk | A standing desk built from a pepper pallet, which he refuses to replace |
| Reads | Agronomy journals, vessel schedules and nineteenth-century ships' logbooks |
| Known for | The jar wall, the turmeric necktie, the pressure-cooker still, and taking a shift on the receiving dock the first Monday of every month |
In His Own Words
Why build HELM instead of buying software?
"Because nobody sells software for a trade that is three thousand years old and runs on handshakes. We had to teach the computer what the traders already knew, and then teach the traders to trust it. The second part was harder."
What is the worst idea you have ever had?
"Trying to dry a lot of wet chiles with the warehouse heating system in 2012. Everyone in the building cried for two days. We do not talk about 2012."
What do you tell people who want to do what you did without a degree?
"The library is free and the forklift certification takes two days. Start there. Then find the oldest person in the building and ask them questions until they tell you to go away. Then come back the next day."
What does the Admiral in Spice Admiral mean?
"It started as a joke about me bossing three people and a forklift around. Then it turned out to describe the job: you do not control the weather or the ocean, but you are responsible for getting the cargo home anyway. I have made my peace with the name."
Outside the Office
Tanner lives in New Jersey with his family and an unreasonable number of pepper plants, several of which have survived longer than anyone expected. He is a licensed amateur radio operator, a persistent but unsuccessful fisherman, and a volunteer instructor in a community program that teaches programming to warehouse and dock workers. He still writes code most weekends, mostly to the alarm of the technology team.
He reads every email sent to inquiries@spiceadmiral.com that mentions his name, and answers most of them, usually at odd hours.
