Three generations, one Chicago kitchen, and one belief: you should decide what's in your food.

I did most of the cooking for Big Ma, so figuring it out fell to me. There was one blend she loved — but it was full of sodium. Now, my son had spent years getting to know a spice maker here in Chicago, Stephen at Epic Spice — Stephen had even walked him through his first turkey. When I told him about Big Ma's problem, he knew Stephen could recreate that blend with no salt at all. So one day I worked up the courage to call Stephen myself. That call is where Mama Nina Spices really begins.

Then my own father had bypass surgery too, and got the same orders. What started as one workaround for Big Ma had become a pattern in my family. And I began to see it everywhere — people who grew up on soul food, in homes and hospitals and schools, being told to give it up. I didn't want anyone to lose their food to a medical chart.

Here's the thing, though: I'm not against salt. I salt my own cooking to taste, like most people do. Salt-free is simply the lane we were born in, and it will always be a core part of what we make. But what Mama Nina Spices is really about is bigger than salt. When everything on the shelf is already seasoned to somebody else's taste, the choice gets taken out of your hands. I want to give it back. You should be the one deciding what's in your food.

I'll be honest — I'm a shy person, and starting a business terrified me. But my children wouldn't let me talk myself out of it. My son Derell and my daughter Shanina kept nudging me forward, and eventually I started showing up — pop-ups, town fests, the women's expo — jar by jar, customer by customer. And I was never alone at that booth. Shanina was right there beside me, and so was Big Ma. Three generations of women, working it together. That's not a theme we invented for a label. It's just what happened.

Mama Nina Spices is simply me finally putting a name to what our family already built. Made for a grandmother, cooked by a mother, sold beside a daughter, carried forward by a push from my kids. And whenever there's a decision to make, I still ask myself the same question: would this feel right to Big Ma?

— Mama Nina