Payam Fardanesh, founder of Silk Road Soda

When Payam Fardanesh started his own business in 2012 there was the regular cohort of disbelievers watching from the sidelines with a shrug—including a few members of his own family. After all, Fardanesh’s plan to bottle his Iranian grandmother’s recipe for the ancient Persian mint and vinegar drink sekanjabin didn’t strike many as a culinary genie waiting to get out of the bottle. Yet after releasing Silk Road Soda, and selling ginger, pomegranate and cucumber flavors out of car trunks, some of the region’s top restaurants and organic food stores began to take notice. Just four years later, Silk Road Soda has a commercial warehouse, a major distributor and a client list from the Pacific Northwest to Texas and Arizona. The drink is an emerging presence on high-end menus and is a favorite on tech company campuses in the Silicon Valley. We caught up with Fardanesh along with Silk Road’s director of operations, Travis Ward, between business meetings to ask about the company’s evolution.

Your father still lives in Iran’s capital, Tehran. What does he think of Silk Road Soda?

In the beginning, my dad just thought it was funny. The idea was basically crazy to him, because so many people in Iran drink this every day that he just saw it as the American equivalent of when people first started bottling lemonade and charging $3 for it. “Who’s going to buy that?” is what he initially thought. Now, he views it differently, He sees it as a way of reaching out culturally.

So how important is the cultural aspect for you?

Personally, it’s giving me a chance to talk about Iran all the time to people. I basically get to talk about that part of my identity every day now. Iran is not exactly a beloved country at the moment, partly because the government has been a militant theocracy for the last 40 years. With this business, I’m sharing another side of Iran—I’m giving people a little glimpse into the food, history and tradition … I’m on my way right now to a meeting in the Bay Area where I’ll be meeting with the owner of a tea company who’s served the Dalai Lama four or five times, and I’ll be giving him a small bag of saffron from Tehran, because that’s a traditional way of sharing within the culture.

Do you make trips to Iran?

No, my father comes here to visit once or twice a year. I can’t go over there right now.

How has Sacramento’s Iranian community responded to the drink?

Good, but this style of drink is one that’s been a part of life all over the Mediterranean and areas of the East where cultures were tied to [the] old Silk Road, so it’s not just popular with Persians; it’s really been embraced by local people with roots in India, Greece and Spain, too. It’s ended up at a lot of parties around here for that very reason. I guess it’s Indians and Persians who have commented the most on its authenticity. They say it’s like having a little taste of home.

Anything unexpected happen once you got going?

I didn’t realize that when we started going up against the giants—Pepsi, Coke, 7 Up—we weren’t just going up against their products, we were going up against their lawyers. They have a lot of contracts with places, for example, entertainment venues, that stipulate if the place is carrying their drink, it’s barred from serving any [other] carbonated beverage of any kind. It’s really locked us out of a lot of opportunities. Fortunately, our drinks have won the top awards in a couple of these big vendor showdowns on the West and East coasts, which led to a lot of calls, especially with different tech companies in the Bay Area interested in having it for their employees. That’s turned into a niche we’ve found.

So how else have you grown the company?

Sacramento itself was an excellent incubator for a new business like this: The city’s restaurateurs really took us in, the local store owners started carrying our products and the farm-to-fork movement welcomed us with open arms. Sacramento was small enough to really give us a shot. It might not be our top market now, but it was the market that opened the door for us. If you look at everything from Broderick’s [Roadhouse] getting us into the State Capitol to the Selland family showcasing us in their restaurants, that is a level of support we never would have gotten if we had tried to start this business in Seattle or San Francisco. We’re really expanding now, but I know without Sacramento we never would have gotten the most important chances we needed.