Where each flagship item comes from.

Ewedu is the slim, mucilaginous leafy green of the jute mallow plant (Corchorus olitorius), and it is native to a wide sweep of tropical Africa — but its lineage story as Yoruba cooks know it lives in southwestern Nigeria. The plant grows easily in the warm, wet garden plots behind Yoruba compounds in Oyo, Ogun, and Ekiti states, where it is sown in the early rains and harvested by hand a few leaves at a time so a single plant keeps producing across an entire wet season.

Epis is the everyday green seasoning base of Haitian cooking — a wet herb purée built from parsley, thyme, scallion, bell pepper, garlic, and lime — and its lineage is the island of Haiti itself. It belongs to the same African + Indigenous + colonial culinary braid that produced pikliz, sauce griot, and soup joumou, but where those are dish-specific, epis is the base that goes into the pan before any of them. Every Haitian cook has a version, and the version a household keeps is the one it learned from the cook who raised them.

Kola is the hard, bittersweet nut of the kola tree (Cola nitida and Cola acuminata), and it is native to the tropical West African forests that run from Sierra Leone through Côte d'Ivoire to Ghana and into the southwestern Nigerian forest belt. The tree grows tall, and its pods each carry clusters of nut-like seeds that are dried for trade, ritual use, and the everyday social greeting that has carried kola through West African life for centuries.

Aso-oke is the hand-loomed prestige cloth of the Yoruba people, and its name translates literally as "top cloth" — the cloth a Yoruba wearer ties over the shoulder when they want to be dressed in full. It is woven on a pit loom called `ọ̀kè`, traditionally by men in the weaving towns of Oyo State: Iseyin, Oyo, and Ijebu-Odé (where the Egba `abada` weavers work), and the cloth has been the prestige wrap of Yoruba chiefs, brides, and titled men for centuries.