When it comes to flavor innovation, we have ideas. Lots of them. It's not practical to turn all of these ideas into products because: math. But what if there was a way we could let you in on those ideas early, and we would commit to build them if you commit to buy them?

From that simple notion, the Test Kitchen was born. We see it as the next evolution of our commitment to Experiment with Flavor, a place for you to collab with us on What Comes Next.

With small production runs of only 500 jars, the Test Kitchen can be a place where our ideas run a little wilder, and we can create niche blends that perhaps only a hardy band of flavor fanatics will love.

Spiceology’s main focus will always be making and selling our tried-and-true signature blends and the freshest core ingredients, but hey, let's see what this becomes.

A campaign is an opportunity to "back" a prototype blend by pledging to buy it if we get enough backers. We need 500 backers in order to "build" a blend -- to mix it, jar it, label it, and ship it out. This helps us keep our production costs down and ensures we're only building what truly interests you (or at least 500 of you).

It does mean you have to wait longer to get that limited-run blend, but we'll do our best to estimate the ship dates and post those to the site and in emails to our backers.

When you back a blend, we'll validate your credit card for the total plus shipping, but we won't charge you. Your card only gets charged if the blend "funds," i.e., if it gets 500 backers before its deadline. If it doesn't fund, the campaign is canceled and there is no charge to you.

When a manufacturer takes a pre-order, it's typically for a product that's already in production, and they charge you for that pre-order upfront. We don't charge you when you pledge, so you're only on the hook if the blend reaches its goal.

We'll begin producing the blend as soon as the campaign reaches its goal. From there, the total lead time is about five weeks. We'll keep you updated via email as the blend comes to life.

We don't charge you unless a blend gets its 500 backers by the posted deadline, so if the flavor gods should fail to smile on a particular blend, we'll simply cancel your pre-order and notify you via email.

We don't have a way for you to do this yourself, but if you send us a note at info@spiceology.com, we can manually cancel your pledge.

PLEASE NOTE: Once a campaign funds (i.e., it has its 500 pledges), we start building the blend to fill your order, so there are no takesies-backsies at that point.

It works the same way as the product charge: your estimated shipping cost is shown when you back a campaign, and we charge you for it when the campaign is funded. Since we custom-build and ship the product when a campaign is complete, we charge you shipping just on that item.

Each successful blend campaign is made-to-order, with its own production and shipping timeline tied to when the campaign funds. For that reason, if you want to back more than one campaign (and we'd love for you to do that!), you have to make a pledge for each one separately.

We think it's important that we not charge you until and unless a campaign reaches 500 backers and becomes a product. The shopping cart functionality on our main site doesn't allow us to charge you for your regular purchases but not charge you for your pledges, so we created this separate little site to make the experience simpler.

Much as we love it when you go all in, these are test blends, so we're simplifying production with our most popular (and let's face it, handsomest) size: the 9-oz glass jar.

Probably, but this truly is a test kitchen -- meaning that we want to understand which blends excite you the most so we can fully stock a select few in the future. But most of the blends we post here will only ever be sold here, so get 'em while they're hot!