How many tons of spices did India export in the 2025–26 financial year?

How to get close to this number

Read the question before estimating: it asks about national spice exports by weight in a single year, not about a recipe. Spices are used in small quantities per meal but consumed by billions of people daily, and India is the largest spice exporter in the world, which puts the figure in the millions of tons rather than the thousands.

The weight is easy to underestimate because spices feel light. A teaspoon is a few grams, but a global population using them daily aggregates into an enormous tonnage, and the export figure counts only what crosses borders — domestic consumption in the producing country is larger still. Bulky everyday spices like chilli dominate the weight, while prized ones like saffron barely register.

The historical note in the explanation is the one worth keeping: this trade is the reason European powers went looking for sea routes to Asia at all. The voyages that produced the Columbus and Magellan questions on this site were commercial expeditions aimed at this commodity, so a modern export statistic sits at the end of a line that redrew the world map.