Outsmarting the Saffron Struggle
July 9, 2024 Saffron has been shown to boost the flavor of food and promote physical health. But with a short growing season and limited harvesting window from late October to early November, it’s difficult to provide a fresh, consistent supply of it that allows consumers to take advantage of saffron’s many benefits. That’s why Saffron Tech will cultivate saffron all year-round in a vertical farm.
Tal Wilk-Glazer | Photo: Saffron Tech
The company launched its pilot site in Ganei Tal, Israel on May 8, 2024. It’s a one-room vertical farm run by five full-time employees and daily subcontractors. CEO of Saffron Tech, Tal Wilk-Glazer, looks forward to growing saffron four times per year and cultivating the spice in an indoor environment.
“When you grow saffron outdoors, the entire field will bloom in one day. You’ll need to go through the entire field in the morning, harvest all the flowers, then start the process again,” says Wilk-Glazer. “You cannot decide which part you are going to harvest today and which part you’re going to harvest tomorrow because everything must be harvested when the flower blooms, or the quality of the saffron will drop.”
Identifying a Business Purpose and Building the Pilot Site
But the decision to cultivate saffron indoors wasn’t made on a whim. Wilk-Glazer spent more than three years researching the spice and developing a business plan to ensure she would see a good return on investment. Considering the high market price of saffron, she wasn’t as worried about making a profit – she was more concerned with cultivating it correctly.
“When you start talking about saffron, you quickly learn how expensive it is, and it’s always good to cultivate something that’s expensive,” she says. “Our first step was understanding what the exact requirements would be for [saffron] cultivation. Once we had a good understanding of the requirements for cultivation, we translated that into technical requirements.”
Most of these requirements meant getting the right technology for cultivation. Wilk-Glazer spoke with many service providers to get the equipment she needed, but struggled to find the right pieces for a reasonable price. “We couldn’t find some [technology] that supported our requirements at a price we believed to be profitable,” she says. “So, we had to take different path and start to identify which pieces we couldn’t buy and developed those instead.”
One piece of equipment Wilk-Glazer and her team developed is the vertical towers used within the farm. Workers planted the first bulbs in the towers the second week of May and will monitor them throughout the first harvesting cycle. During this process, Wilk-Glazer will pay close attention to how the towers function and how much electricity is needed to run the vertical farm. “The most expensive part [of vertical farming] is electricity. You need to take the sun, which is free, and exchange it for electricity for climate control,” she says.
Saffron Flowers in Bloom | Photo: Saffron Tech
Harvesting the Saffron and Selling it to the Right Market
Saffron Tech partnered with different organizations to develop the site, including DreamTech, a Korean tech company, and the Israeli Innovation Authority. Wilk-Glazer also worked with multiple LED companies to come up with the right lighting solution to cultivate saffron, which is still a work in progress.
“We are taking smaller groups of corns and testing different lighting solutions on each one,” she says. “One group will get more red light at one point in cultivation, and another group will get more blue light at the same point. This allows us to understand exactly what’s improving the [saffron] cultivation and what the exact impact is.”
The pilot site will harvest saffron four times per year, but with staggered flowering times. “Basically, we’re going to have graduated flowering in each part of the farm,” she says. “We’ll have four cycles per year, but each part of the farm won’t flower at the same time.”
The Saffron Tech Team | Photo: Saffron Tech
Once workers harvest the saffron, it will be easier to distribute in the market since it’s a dry material. Unlike lettuce and mint, which perish quickly, the spice is much easier to transfer from city to city. This encouraged Wilk-Glazer to target the nutraceutical and cosmetic markets, which she believes are more profitable, instead of the culinary market. “When looking at things from a business perspective, the ability to have premium prices in these markets is much better than the culinary market,” she says.
While there are many benefits to cultivating saffron, it’s difficult to do for economic reasons. This is especially true when it comes to outdoor farming, as the yield per square meter in a saffron field is low. Plus, saffron is typically cultivated in a very limited number of places where the climate is conducive to growing the spice in open fields, such as Iran. “If you have a field, it’s probably better to grow anything other than saffron,” she says. “You need a huge amount of working hands for such a short flowering period.”
With its new indoor vertical farm, Saffron Tech reduced the need for so many “working hands,” as it can stagger harvesting the flowers. This is a huge win for nutraceutical and cosmetic companies who use saffron in their products and require a reliable supply.
“I expect that the ability to grow consistent, high–quality saffron is going to be a real game changer in several markets,” says Wilk-Glazer. “The majority of [cosmetic and nutraceutical] companies are either using it in a very limited manner or simply don’t use it because their supply is not stable.”
Saffron Tech’s new facility aims to boost these industries up by providing them with the saffron they need, when they need it. While the site might be a one-room vertical farm now, the company plans to have a mass production facility up and running by the second half of 2025.
This article is part of our inaugural edition of CEAg World Insights. Click here to view the entire interactive report.