Why saffron is so expensive????

Even in the expensive world of spices, saffron stands out and the real saffron can cost you over $10000 per kilogram. Sought after for thousands of years as a spice, a dye and a medicine.

For making just 1 gram of saffron you need over 150 flowers. Some times the product we use in name of saffron may be false. So, just what makes this spice so expensive?

Saffron is the red stigma of the Crocus Sativus. Each crocus have 3 small stigmas, that have to be picked carefully by hand.

This minuscule harvest means that the amount you get from each flower is roughly 0.006 grams. No machine can do this delicate work to harvest these thin threads and it can take 40 hours of hard manual labor to produce just 1 kilogram of high quality saffron.

Growing the plants isn’t exactly easy either. The buds are actually called corms but, they are like a bulb basically like a flower bulb. So, the more flowers per bulb you can get and bigger the flowers are and this all depends on how you look after that, like growing , climatic conditions.

So. Once the flowers started growing, harvesters have to work fast to make sure they can pick it all in time. Almost all the saffron that is planted can flower within one week of the year and to maintain the quality, the flowers are best picked during the morning.  Quality is key when growing such a precise crop and the taste of the saffron depends on the rainfall, temperature and soil.

Kashmir is famed for producing some of the highest quality saffron in the world. In Kashmir, red soil is mostly found and this is fertilized and good for saffron.

 The most  expensive highest grade saffron is generally made up of just the very tips of the Stigma.

In Iran,where over 90% of the saffron is produced. There are 4 grades. The lowest grade is the bunch I.e., the entire strand that’s pulled from the flower, from the dark red tips to the yellow base. In higher grades, the yellow strand is removed leaving a long strand of pure red.

One kilo of saffron is made up of around 4,50,000 strands and you need 1,50,000 flowers and to grow these flowers, it needs a large space.

Over 200 metric tons of saffron threads are harvested worldwide each year. This is the result of over 30billion flowers. The demand for the threads is so high that some might produce fake saffron.Some threads are even made of corn silks, coconut fibers or even horse hair, and to made it look real- synthetic colors are used to dye the lower grade stigmas and sell them as high grade saffron.

 The main reason for the increasing demand of saffron is climate change which is drastically changing. In Kashmir, production has dropped significantly and many farmers are selling their land instead.

Between 2017 and 2018, saffron production in the region fell almost 70% from 16.5 metric tonnes down to 5.2 and with continuing droughts and climate change the current harvest could become even more rare