Indian market opens in Pierce County with rows of spices, fresh produce, snacks and more

If you’ve been on the hunt for assam tea, organic lentils and the right spices for a homemade jar of spicy mango pickles, a new Indian market near Puyallup has everything you need — and probably more.

Ravinder Singh opened Spice World, a 5,000-square-foot store at 10417 Canyon Road, in late December with business partners Sukhwinder Singh (no relation) and Nevjot Singh, his brother-in-law. Originally they planned to call it Punjabi Hut but updated the name to reflect a broader mission.

“We have a goal to bring more customers and more variety from different communities,” he told The News Tribune.

They knew the area was ripe for such a specialized store. The nearest Indian markets required a 45-minute to hour-long one-way drive to Kent or Renton, while some fastidious shoppers might have traveled farther north to Issaquah or Bellevue, where a denser population of Indian families have settled in Washington state.

Singh had been making those voyages himself since moving to Puyallup a year ago.

He had first considered opening his own store almost five years ago but struggled to secure a loan. With the co-ownership of his colleague in the trucking business and his wife’s brother, they found the funds and then this retail space in the Summit-Waller area — a superior choice to Meridian for two reasons, he added.

First, it’s less of a hassle to drive on Canyon Road, and being near state Route 512 positions Spice World nearer to Tacoma and Olympia. It’s also close enough to South King County that those Kent-Renton shoppers might head south instead.

“It was a good opportunity because we had no Indian grocery store here,” said Singh in February.

He postulated that like his family, others — especially those working from their computers — moved to Pierce County from places like Bellevue in search of more land and more spacious housing.

In just the first two months, he said, customers have visited from Olympia, Tumwater, Lacey, Tacoma and Bonney Lake.

ON THE SHELVES AT SPICE WORLD PUYALLUP

A broad selection of imports predominantly from India and Nepal, as well as suppliers and producers in North America, provides Indian families a one-stop-shop to cook their regional cuisines at home. But Singh also hopes to attract customers outside the Indian American community to explore (requests for Fijian ingredients, for instance, have been honored) or to simply fill their pantries for a fair price.

“We are just trying to keep our prices as low as we can,” he said, without sacrificing quality.

Two full walls of refrigeration house dairy, including dahi (Indian-style curd yogurt) and paneer from Nanak Foods, a Vancouver-based company; a multitude of cold drinks like Thums Up (Indian Coke with a hint of rose) and Kashmira masala jeera soda; and packaged foods from frozen naan and momos to kulfi (full-fat ice cream).

In the middle aisles, scour the shelves for snacks and all of the ingredients you need to make curries, daal, biryani — even the best flours to make chapati, parathi and poori in your home oven.

A small produce section features otherwise hard-to-find ingredients like bitter gourds, coriander leaves and those green mangoes, as well as standards such as ginger, turmeric and okra. An attached room also offers cookware including useful stainless steel bowls and mortar and pestles, as well as Ayurvedic medicinal herbs, spices and tools.

Just need the basics? Spice World also serves as a regular grocery store, with onions, carrots, garlic and rice.

After hearing from customers who preferred a particular brand or style of rice beyond basmati, they expanded the selection. “Now we have a special section for the rice,” said Singh, noting the differences between Northern and Southern Indian cooking. “We try to keep everything in the store.”

In the future, he hopes to bring an Indian food truck to the parking lot.

SPICE WORLD - PUYALLUP

▪ 10417 Canyon Road E., Puyallup, 253-212-3408

▪ Daily 10 a.m.-8 p.m.

▪ Details: Indian grocery store packed with whole and ground spices, ingredients for Indian cooking and packaged food and drink, plus cookware and Ayurvedic products

This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 5:00 AM.