Oryx Desert Salt Marks Five Years at Whole Foods Market as Desert Salt Emerges in American Grocery

Cape Town, South Africa, September 1st, 2026, FinanceWire

The South African brand founded by Samantha Skyring now reaches roughly 485 Whole Foods Market stores, 230 World Market locations, and travelers on JetBlue and Amtrak, built on a salt source certified microplastic-free at the source.

Oryx Desert Salt, the South African company behind the desert salt category, today marks five years since Whole Foods Market took the brand national in the United States, a milestone that has seen the brand grow from a hand-packed startup into a presence in roughly 485 Whole Foods stores, about 230 World Market locations, and onboard service for JetBlue and Amtrak at a volume of approximately 150,000 individual sachets per month.

The five-year retail anniversary caps a period of steady international growth. The company today exports to more than 23 countries, employs a team of around 35 people, and counts more than 130 partner brands that formulate their own products with its salt. The brand's Amazon presence in the American market is now in its fourth year.

"Reaching five years with Whole Foods Market means more to us than any single sales number, because it proves that a small, initially self-funded brand from South Africa can earn and keep its place in American grocery by refusing to compromise on purity," said founder and CEO Samantha Skyring. "Our salt leaves the Kalahari exactly as nature made it, and shoppers have shown us, year after year, that this is what they want on their tables."

Defining a New Category on the Shelf

Desert salt is positioned as a fourth option alongside the three salts most shoppers already know: refined table salt, sea salt, and pink Himalayan. The category rests on the geography of its origin. Oryx Desert Salt is harvested from a remote salt pan in the Kalahari Desert, where three underground streams moving through ancient Dwyka rock feed a vast subterranean brine aquifer, and where the surrounding region holds no industry, no agriculture and no settlement for 175 miles.

The salt crystallizes naturally under the desert sun and is packed exactly as harvested: filled with essential minerals and trace elements, unbleached, unprocessed with no artificial additives such as anti-caking chemicals. It carries a certification of microplastic-free at source, which the company scopes precisely to the point of origin, acknowledging that airborne microplastics make guarantees beyond the source impossible for any producer anywhere.

That precision responds to a documented problem. Peer-reviewed research published since 2018 has repeatedly detected microplastic particles across the large majority of commercial sea salts tested worldwide, a body of findings covered by National Geographic, The Guardian and the World Economic Forum. Desert salt's answer is structural rather than technological: a source that modern contamination has not reached.

The company extends the same logic into its packaging. Every Oryx Desert Salt grinder is built with a ceramic grinding mechanism instead of the plastic head found in most disposable grinders, and each one is designed to be refilled from refill boxes rather than thrown away, under the company motto of ‘Refill Not Landfill’.

Image Credit: Oryx Desert Salt

From a Dining Table in Cape Town to 485 American Stores

The company's origin has become one of South African retail's better-known founder stories. Samantha Skyring launched the business in 2010 with no outside investment, and in 2011 sold the house she owned in Johannesburg, creating an opening inventory of 34 tonnes of Kalahari salt. She filled the earliest grinders herself at her dining table while raising her young son, and the first customers found the salt at weekend farmers markets and in neighborhood delis and health stores and on restaurant tables.

In 2013, Skyring began 12 years of mentorship and investment by Evolve Capital - brothers Ian and Garth Solomon - as well as 5 years partnership with Zur Ventures which supported Skyring to grow the business and build her vision. When 2020 took approximately 60 percent of the company's sales, Skyring concentrated on a single goal: reaching the Whole Foods category buyer without an intermediary distributor. Her persistence produced the national listing in September 2021 that the company celebrates today. Her work has since earned recognition as South Africa's Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024.

Giving Back Built Into the Model

"From our very first month of trading, long before we were profitable, we set aside a share of every single sale not profit, for the ǂKhomani San and Mier communities” said Skyring. "It is important that we honor the original custodians of the land where we source our salt and we create a circular economy”. 

Those monthly contributions flow through the TFPD Foundation, and the company recently partnered with Project Biome, a global initiative for reconnecting people to nature that launched its first project in South Africa and is supported through a share of the brand's American sales. The commitment to community wellbeing shapes the product line too: the chili in the chili salt grows in backyard community gardens in Gugulethu township and surrounding communities near Cape Town, while Madagascan small-scale farmers supply the peppercorns for the black pepper line.

Skyring shares the harvesting process, the salt pans and the communities behind the brand on Oryx Desert Salt's Instagram.

Availability

Oryx Desert Salt grinders and refills can be found on Amazon's Whole Foods storefront, at Whole Foods Market, World Market and Natural Grocers stores nationwide, and in onboard service on JetBlue and Amtrak.

Image Credit: Oryx Desert Salt

About Oryx Desert Salt

Oryx Desert Salt is a founder-led, initially self-funded South African company harvesting pure, sun-dried, unrefined salt from an ancient underground brine source beneath the Kalahari Desert. Named for the desert antelope that inspired its founder during a 75-mile walk through the Namib Desert in 2000, the company supplies retail, food service and ingredient partners in more than 23 countries, directs a share of all sales to the indigenous communities of the Kalahari, and packages its products in refillable glass grinders with ceramic mechanisms under its motto, ‘Refill Not Landfill’.

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