If you can’t find it, we probably have it.

When South China Seas opened in Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market in 1987, our product line was focused on South East Asia. Since then, it has expanded to include everything needed to prepare the foods of Asia, India, the Caribbean and Mexico, plus an ever growing range of rare and hard-to-find ingredients from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere – an astonishingly diverse array of products that includes fresh and fragrant herbs and rare spices, sauces and condiments, fresh and dried chiles, exotic fruits, vegetables and mushrooms, curries, chutneys and pickles, fragrant teas, fresh and dried pastas, uncommon rice varieties, seaweeds & sushi ingredients, dim sum & dumplings, fresh tortillas, Mexican cheeses, preserved lemons, pomegranate molasses, orange blossom water, Middle Eastern and North African couscous, truffle oils, truffle butters and fresh Alba and Perigord truffles from Italy and France and much, much more.

We also carry an extensive selection of cookbooks with a focus on global culinary traditions, the work of ground-breaking chefs and books for culinary professionals.

Specialty cookware (including huge granite mortar and pestles from Thailand) and tableware to enhance the experience of preparing and sharing a meal rounds out our inventory at both locations.

Outside of Vancouver we are perhaps best known for our proprietary dried herbs, spices, chiles, mushrooms, exotic rice varieties and pastas which are unsurpassed in quality and freshness. A good selection of these products is available on Vancouver Island at Plenty in Victoria and at Beyond the Kitchen Door in Courtenay. Stong's Market on Vancouver's West Side carries a smaller selection of some of the more popular items.

In addition to the cost of the goods, we charge for shipping at cost (Canada Post or Greyhound), and on orders of $150.00 or less, we charge an additional $10.00 to cover packaging and handling.

Many items are available in bulk at a substantial discount. We define bulk as ten times the weight of our regular retail package size – for example, 560 grams of kalongi would be considered bulk. Please note that bulk orders will generally take longer to fill – rather than maintaining back-up stock, we prefer to bring in spices, etc. in small quantities to ensure freshness.

Sorry, but current import restrictions (such as having to obtain pre-clearance for each item from Homeland Security) make shipping to the US too costly to be practical – we hope that this will change.

See a list of our dried herbs and spices, specialty salts, dried chiles and mushrooms, grains, flours and pastas.