- Starting as a single mother packing salt in a 20-square-metre wooden house, Samatha Skyring built Oryx into an international brand now sold in 20 countries, including Whole Foods and JetBlue Airlines.
- A colleague showed Skyring ancient Kalahari salt deposits in 2007, and she later chose the oryx as her logo after remembering her desert encounter with the animals years earlier.
- Oryx uses ceramic grinder heads instead of plastic ones to prevent contamination from degraded plastic entering food and reduce landfill waste.
When the world’s salt brands were pouring chemicals into white powder and calling it seasoning, Samantha Skyring was sitting on a sand dune in north-west Namibia with a crocodile spear made from a bread knife lashed to a stick.
Skyring, her partner, and a friend had been in the Namibian desert for five months with no real plan. They took a wrong turn up a dry riverbed, burned through their fuel, and ended up 350 kilometres from the nearest town.
They set up camp and decided to keep walking, leading them over a sand dune where the road simply ended. It was here that they found a raging, wide river on the other side, complete with white beaches, palm trees and rock pools.
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“We’d been in the desert for months,” she says. “To see gushing water was spectacular. It was like, okay, we’ve arrived in paradise.”
They decided to keep walking to the Skeleton Coast. Backpacks on and bread-knife spear in hand with enough food for a week. They pre-hydrated with three litres of tea each morning and climbed into the dunes to avoid the crocodile-lined banks of the Kunene River below.
And then there were the oryx.
Two bulls, mid-chase, came charging up the dune toward her and skidded to a stop – because she was sitting directly in their path.
“The Namib Desert is 30 000 square kilometres,” she says. “And two oryx ran up a sand dune and skidded because I was sitting in their path. They didn’t run that way. They didn’t run that way. Literally, that was it.”
She didn’t understand the significance at the time; that took a couple of years. Skyring calls these moments signposts – small collisions between where you are and where you’re supposed to be going. The oryx, as it turned out, was pointing her somewhere specific.
She didn’t know it yet, but the animal that had just skidded to a halt in front of her would become the logo of a company that now sits on 3 500 restaurant tables and flies on JetBlue Airways.
A rollercoaster of a career
Skyring doesn’t have a conventional career history. She has a series of experiments, some of which worked.
Her parents had a financial crash when she was 13, so she went out and got two jobs. Her father then bought a business – an aircraft interior refurbishment company at Lanseria Airport – when she was 19, and put her in charge of 35 staff. At 21, she got married and started a kayaking company on Lake Malawi, and she lost the business and moved on.
Then there were London clubs and Cape Town festivals. A year living on a fleet parked on top of Signal Hill. Production management. An NGO called the 20 000 Drum Project that workshopped 30 000 kids across the country.
Samantha with the Oryx salt.
Supplied/Samantha Skyring
“When I have an idea, I don’t put together a big business plan,” she says. “It’s almost like you pop your own dream with an axe if you do.”
Her father never told her that an idea was a bad one, and she describes this as one of her greatest blessings – the belief that, whatever she tried, she could do it.
Then, in 2007, a colleague showed her something that changed the trajectory: a vast underground salt lake buried beneath the Kalahari Desert. An ancient rock strata that is 280 million years old, where three subterranean rivers replenish the source. From it comes 55 million tons of brine, so oversaturated that when it’s drawn up onto the pan, it crystallises in a single lunar cycle, shaped by wind, stars, and the African sun.
“It’s the only rock we eat,” she says. “And this one holds the memory of the elements.”
Born in a Wendy house
At this point, she was eight and a half months pregnant. Her NGO had collapsed in the financial crisis, and her relationship was ending. Her colleague wanted to export the salt in bulk to Germany, and the father of her child wanted to ship it to Denmark.
But Skyring had a better idea, and she took a leap. She sold her house, used the money to buy 34 tonnes of salt, moved into a 20-square-metre wooden Wendy House with her three-year-old, and started packing grinders on a little table.
“I was in survival mode. New single mom. Which is a blessing.”
When coming up with a name for the brand, African Salt felt too generic, she says. “It could be from anywhere.” Then, the image of that masked creature on the dune from years ago came back to her. The oryx is endemic to the Kalahari, and the salt comes from the Kalahari, so she chose it as her logo.
Her very first boyfriend once told her: “If you can find a product that every single person uses every single day of their life, you’ve found your business.” Salt, it turned out, was exactly that.
The grinder problem
There is an argument at the centre of Oryx that Skyring has been making for 12 years, and she still finds it frustrating that it hasn’t fully landed.
Almost every salt grinder on a supermarket shelf is plastic, and salt is abrasive, so plastic grinder teeth wear down and end up in your food, which you then eat. The grinder then breaks, you throw it away, buy another one, and grind more plastic into your next meal. Plastic is an endocrine disruptor, she says. The cycle, as Skyring sees it, is absurd.
“We shouldn’t be voluntarily eating plastic.”
Her solution is a ceramic grinder head that doesn’t degrade, doesn’t contaminate your food, and doesn’t need to be replaced. You buy one Oryx grinder and refill it.
Last year, that single design choice kept close to 817 000 bottles and heads out of landfill – the equivalent of 12 20-foot shipping containers of waste.
It also saves money, she argues. Four plastic grinders at R35 each cost R140, and you’ve thrown away four plastic bottles. One Oryx grinder plus refills for the same period comes to R165 and produces zero waste, she explains.
But the message has been hard to get across. Skyring has tried stickers that look like awards. She’s added a tag inside the lid that reads, “Hi, I’m a ceramic grinder head. Please don’t throw me away.”
On the cap: Refill, not landfill. This year, she’s adding an inkjet code on the side and a message on the bottom – four different touchpoints on a single product, all trying to communicate the same thing.
However, she says she is still struggling to get the message to land. She tells the story of how she gifted a box to a friend, who opened it, pulled out the tag, and threw it away without reading it.
“It’s an ongoing thing,” she sighs.
‘Table salt isn’t salt’
Skyring is equally serious about what most people don’t know about the white powder in their cupboard.
Table salt, she explains, is demineralised, heated, and loaded with anti-caking and free-flow chemicals so it pours neatly. It was the start of the food convenience era in 1910, she says – designed to look good, not to be good for you.
The chemicals prevent salt from absorbing moisture, which is precisely what the body needs it to do. Natural salt works by osmosis: place Oryx salt on a plate next to table salt and within a day or two, the Oryx will be wet, while the table salt stays bone dry.
“Salt should have one ingredient,” she says. “It should be salt. Not salt and…”
Sea salt isn’t much better, she explains. Ninety-five percent has tested positive for microplastics, and the cruise line industry alone dumps a billion tonnes of sewage into the ocean every year.
Himalayan salt – the beautiful pink phenomenon that got the world off table salt – is dynamited out of mountains, leaving chemical residue and gunpowder energy in the crystals. She says the demand for it has driven communities to undercut each other for contracts, some earning as little as $3-4 per ton.
The Kalahari salt, by contrast, is sun-dried in four weeks, with nothing added, and the communities around the pan receive a percentage of the proceeds, she says.
Oryx donates to Dr Zach Bush’s Project Biome, a regenerative agriculture initiative, and slips a QR code for the project under every sachet that flies on JetBlue – around two million packets a year.
“Every sprinkle of Oryx on someone’s food is a homoeopathic dose of this mineral-rich, vibrant salt,” she says. “And if you start questioning the quality of your salt, there’s a good chance you start questioning the source of everything else you’re eating.”
The path to where Oryx is now has not been smooth, with multiple business partners over the course of a decade. After that point, she had to step back and calculate what she’d actually built – the staff grown from a handful to 45 and the brand taken from a table in a Wendy House to shelves in 20 countries. She says she had never properly assessed her own contribution.
“Only when I got myself benchmarked and started pushing back did the relationships start souring. It was me valuing me.”
She put out a call for help on her network and was surprised by who showed up – predominantly men who mentored her and gave advice willingly. Her new partner arrived through an improbable chain: she met someone walking up Lion’s Head, who mentioned Skyring’s business to another person without her knowledge, and he came on board.
She describes him as an entrepreneur and investor simultaneously, a combination she’d been looking for without quite realising it.
“I really believe in the soul journey,” she says. “And that we choose.”
The Oryx team
The Oryx team is predominantly women, making up 80 to 85% of her staff, and she takes their well-being to heart.
Last year, they did a self-defence course, and the year before, parenting. This year, she asked them what they wanted instead of deciding for them. Part of her new shareholders’ agreement includes an employee share scheme, so the people who’ve helped build Oryx will share in whatever it becomes.
“When Oryx is successful, my team will be successful,” she says. “That’s a very big part of my why now.”
“The journey of Oryx has been as much a vehicle for personal growth as it has been a business,” she says. “I like sharing that with them.”
What comes next
Oryx is now 15 years old and is stocked nationwide at Whole Foods in the US, and is available in around 20 countries. Skyring grew her LinkedIn network to 6 000 handpicked connections over five years to prepare for the American launch, and says she wants to get the product on more airlines, too.
Entrepreneur Nick Dreyer recently told her Oryx belongs in the same conversation as Bokomo and Omo – brands so embedded in South African life they barely need introduction.
“That is the best compliment I’ve ever been given.”
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