Love That Spice & Tea Shop

Love That Spice (LTS) is a premium, quality driven spice and tea merchant that brings high quality exotic spices, herbs and and handcrafted tea blends to your doorstep. Love That Spice was founded by Marlena Jayatilake in 2012 to bring awareness of the phenomenal health benefits of spices and herbs and to empower and inspire us to transform our kitchens into nature’s beautiful apothecary. Growing up in an urban setting, the knowledge of ancient healing through plants was virtually unknown. Upon marrying into the Jayatilake family, Marlena became a lover of plants and herbs and the healing properties within.

Family owned and operated, at Love That Spice, we focus on providing fresh ground, handcrafted spice blends and exotic hand blended teas of the highest quality. We offer to you hand-selected, premium quality items from gardens sourced around the world.   

 Our unique shop is warm and inviting with the bold colors of spices in a peaceful environment. Our retail shop opened on October 14, 2013 in the beautiful and quaint town of Highland Park, IL.  Within our retail store, you will find several varieties of spice blends based on popular world cuisines and teas masterfully blended right before your eyes, while you wait. Aside from offering over 160 different products, LTS also serves to inform the community about the multitude of health benefits that come from supplementing one’s diets with spices and herbs. We arm people with the knowledge that fresh ground spices and herbs are rich in nutrients and vitamins and have been used for thousands of years known as Ayurveda.

The goal of Love that Spice is to continue to share the health benefits of spices and herbs and the range of boosters as well as bold flavors it can add to traditional and non-traditional cuisine no to mention a fantastic cup of tea! Love That Spice brings century old international health and cultural use to a local platform--filling a health and cultural gap. 

LTS also engages with the community by hosting cooking classes, herbal wellness workshops, volunteering at elementary schools teaching tea blending, donating many wellness baskets for auctions for various community schools and charities, hosting wellness events with practicing doctors and hosting cooking parties and high tea events. As seen on ABC Channel 7, we have consistently shared our knowledge of the wide array of health benefits associated with spices, herbs and whole leaf tea and we present it in such a way that is approachable to all.

In this day and age, time and health are of the essence. Society has now begun to look to Mother Earth for holistic remedies for the balance of body, mind and spirit. Our products are made with wellness in mind. We understand that Earth provides us with the tools we need for a life full of happiness and wellness and we intend to share it with the world for generations to come. We strive to offer up-to-date news on the relatively unknown health benefits of super foods, spices and herbs and seeks to engage with new customers so that they walk away confident indulging in teas and in using spices in their own cooking and aware of the benefits of such.