OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — If you’re staring down a frozen turkey and a shopping list longer than Highway 24 at rush hour, there’s one East Bay stop that can quietly level up just about every part of your Thanksgiving meal: Oaktown Spice Shop.
From turkey brine mixes to baking spices for pies, the Bay Area–born spice company has turned into a go-to for home cooks and some pretty big-name chefs — and their Thanksgiving lineup might be the secret ingredient your table is missing this year.
An East Bay spice shop with serious cred
Oaktown Spice Shop started in Oakland back in 2011 and has steadily grown from a neighborhood storefront near Lake Merritt into a small local chain, with shops in Oakland, Albany, San Francisco and now Los Angeles.
Food & Wine has named Oaktown Spice one of the world’s best spice shops, and the company now mills many of its spices in-house at a separate production facility so the jars on the shelves are as fresh as possible.
Chefs from places like Chez Panisse and cookbook author Samin Nosrat have leaned on Oaktown’s blends and single-origin spices.
For everyday East Bay cooks, that same lineup is sitting in jars you can pull down and sniff before you buy — something you just don’t get when you toss a mystery bottle into your cart at the grocery store.
Thanksgiving essentials: brines, poultry seasoning and more
Walk into Oaktown’s Thanksgiving section and you’ll see right away that turkey is the main event. The shop sells a Classic Brine Mix — a blend built on sea salt and aromatics — that makes about 1.5 gallons of brine, enough for a medium turkey or two whole chickens.
If you like a little smoke on your bird, there’s also a Smoky Brine Mix that starts with smoked sea salt and adds spices designed to keep the meat juicy while layering on flavor.
Once the turkey is brined, Oaktown’s Sage & Spice Poultry Seasoning steps in as the finishing touch — their own recipe that leans on rubbed sage, white pepper, ginger, thyme and green onion. It’s designed to be rubbed on the turkey and tossed into stuffing or dressing so everything tastes like it came from the same herb garden.
The shop’s website even features a full Brined Roasted Turkey with Sage & Spice Poultry Seasoning recipe that walks you through using their brine mix and rub from start to finish, including how much seasoning to use on a 14–16 pound bird.
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Not just the turkey: sides, pies and vegetarian dishes
The “Thanksgiving Essentials” section on Oaktown’s site groups together brines, poultry blends and side-dish helpers, but their shelves and online store go much further than just turkey.
Their baking spice collection covers everything from classic ground cinnamon and nutmeg to more specialized options like cardamom, star anise and single-origin cinnamon — the kind of upgrades that can quietly transform pumpkin pie, apple crisp or sweet potato casserole.
Oaktown also posts recipes that show off less expected Thanksgiving flavors, like Chinese Five Spice Apple Crisp or Persian Lime Curry Roasted Carrots with labneh, hinting at how easily their blends can tilt a traditional holiday menu in a slightly more adventurous direction. Shoutout to our friends at OMG! Yummy for covering this.
How to shop Oaktown Spice for Thanksgiving
If you’re a “sniff every jar” person, the original Oakland shop at 546 Grand Ave sits just uphill from Lake Merritt and feels like an old-school apothecary: wood shelves, jars labeled in the same clean type, and staff who will happily talk you through what to use on a bird versus in a pie.
There are also locations on Solano Avenue in Albany and on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, plus a newer shop in Los Angeles for anyone visiting family down south but still wanting to bring a little East Bay flavor with them.
If you’d rather avoid pre-holiday parking hunts, Oaktown’s online store ships across the Bay Area and features curated Thanksgiving sections, gift boxes and samplers that double as host gifts.
Read Next: After you’ve stocked up on brines and baking spices, you can see how far local grocery deals will still take you in our look at the one East Bay supermarket that still gives away free turkeys for Thanksgiving. If you’re more of a splurge person, you can compare your bird to the $182 Thanksgiving turkey we tried and crowned the best in the Bay Area, then burn it all off afterward with one of our favorite East Bay hikes to walk off Thanksgiving dinner.
