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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that saffron grows almost anywhere (there's people growing it up here in Norway). It's mainly the labor to harvest the threads that makes it economically unviable.

I guess you can sell American produced saffron at a premium but I'd still love to see the labor cost / profit calculation on those.

>In 2021, Peace and Plenty harvested 700,000 flowers, which yielded about 3.5 kilograms of saffron. Ms. Price sold it to home cooks, and to chefs.

>I was doing one flower per five seconds at my fastest, which sounds good

So with 5 seconds per flowers 700,000 flowers are about 1000 man hours to harvest. With the Californian $16.5 minimum wage that'd mean about $4.50 per gram just in harvesting labor cost.

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I was about to say that $4.50 in labor cost doesn't seem outrageous, given the high retail prices but according to my low effort internet search in the US cheap saffron goes wholesale for about $0.81 / gram and expensive saffron does for about $1.68 / gram. The retail markup on this is quite high!

You could potentially make it work selling direct to consumer, which might not be so bad given the very low quantities we're talking about here.

"A nation of shopkeepers" applies here. Intermediate steps and distribution, all the steps along the way extract their little bit here and there. The economy is built like a bloated JavaScript framework with a call stack 100 layers deep.

I'm surprised that, as the price increased, there has not been a mechanical automation found that would remove the labor requirement. Terrible for developing countries where labor is cheap and depends on that laborious task of harvesting threads.

It's been done, by the iSaffron unit of Solbar Food Technologies in Israel.[1] Or so says a hype site from iSaffron in 2021.[2] No current mention. Solbar is the largest soybean processor in Israel, and saffron would be a rounding error for them.

A Swedish company which produces saffron uses some robotics.[3] There's a German student group doing something. Nobody has video of anything working.

It's probably do-able, but too niche to justify the effort.

This 2018 "automatic saffron processing machine" looks fake.[4]

[1] https://www.solbartech.com/about/

[2] https://www.isaffron.life/

[3] https://osterlensaffran.io/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQMwknN8wQY

> My understanding is that saffron grows almost anywhere

As in it grows in a farm, outside, under the sun, in Norway?

Otherwise, Banana, coffee and Mango can also be cultivated anywhere in a controlled/enclosed environment.

Saffron comes from crocus flowers. Crocus is an extremely common plant, you can probably find bulbs for sale for it in ever big box home improvement store in the US during the spring

Close but not quite correct. Saffron comes from a specific Crocus plant named Crocus Sativus aka Autumn Crocus (because it blooms in Autumn). It’s easily mistaken with the other Crocus flowers. They require different climates. I can’t be sure (don’t live in US) but I would be surprised if they sell Saffron flowers in such stores as it wouldn’t make much sense for gardening, especially if want to have spring flowers.

Indeed, and they're well suited to northern climes. Here in the upper Midwest, they're one of the first things up in the spring, often poking up through the snow.

In the Netherlands and Flanders the week-long school break in late February/early March is called the Krokusvakantie (crocus vacation).

It's growing in our back garden which freezes solid every winter. In fact the crocus is very hardy - it grows on a path which we walk over every day.

(I still buy saffron in the shops.)

People commonly mistake other Crocus family flowers with Saffron's. Are you sure it's Crocus Sativus? Crocus is common and the flower looks very similar to Saffron's but it is not that. When do they bloom? If they bloom in Spring (which I suspect they do, they are also common here in Germany) they are not exactly the same plant and they have different requirements.

Grows outside in people's front/back yards. People grow them for fun. Farming wouldn't make sense.

Not Norway but there is a place in Switzerland, far up the in the Alps, very proud of it's saffron traditions.

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