Have you ever wondered where the salt in your kitchen comes from?

Salt is a curious and critical feature of our modern culinary lives, and the process of creating table salt for the kitchen isn’t as simple as you may imagine.

The process of turning saltwater into table salt often takes 20 months, and it all starts in a salt mine. Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest salt mine is located in Namibia, and Namibia’s Walvis Bay Holdings produces more than 700,000 tonnes of salt per year. The massive mine covers around 6,000 hectares of land and produces what is often referred to as “Namibia’s white gold.” The salt produced here is typically sold to countries such as South Africa and Nigeria before moving on to global destinations.

The work involved in mining salt is generally reliant on the right weather conditions. Salt needs wind, sunshine, and seawater in order to be produced. As such, days when evaporation is high are great for salt production, but days which are cold and misty are bad for the evaporation process and thus bad for salt production. From this point, it typically takes 18-20 months for this salt to reach your kitchen cabinet, although the consumer’s end of the process is the smallest and simplest portion of salt’s long journey.

The largest salt mine in Namibia is only ten kilometers from the nearby port, offering Walvis Bay Holdings a great amount of convenience. The salt that is produced is packaged into 20-kilogram bags for export to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The salt is then used to create chemicals such as magnesium oxide, and components for fertilizers. Much of the salt will of course be made into your typical sodium chloride table salt.

Salt has been a critical component of trade and the culinary arts for millennia now. The etymology of the ward “salary” is believed to have come from the salt allowance given to Roman soldiers throughout the empire. The modern world has even more uses for salt than the ancient world did, of course. The salt mining process has always been and will continue to be critical to our global economy.