Saffron prices reach parity with gold

ANTALYA

The price of saffron has soared to unprecedented heights, aligning with the revered status of gold in the market.

Pricing at a staggering 600,000 Turkish Liras ($18,500) per kilogram, saffron — the prized spice renowned for its culinary, pharmaceutical and industrial applications — has reached parity with the precious metal with 4 grams of the aromatic spice now fetching equivalent to a gram of gold.

Owing to its arduous production process, once-in-a-year harvest, and versatility in uses, saffron is one of the world’s most valuable commodities.

Ali Manavoğlu, head of the Antalya Branch of Food Engineers, shared the formidable challenges in saffron cultivation, emphasizing its labor-intensive nature and restricted geographical cultivation zones.

"Saffron is one of the most expensive foods in the world," Manavoğlu says. "Saffron, which can only be grown in certain regions, is actually a flower. It is grown in countries such as Iran, Greece and Spain. It is very laborious to grow and collect and is a very mild spice. For this reason, the price of 10 grams went up to 5 to 6 thousand liras."

With each flower yielding merely three threads, the task of collecting 450,000 saffron strands from 150,000 flowers by hand for a single kilogram requires painstaking effort.

Manavoğlu cautioned against the prevalence of counterfeit saffron flooding the market and said, "When we look at the use of saffron, it can give its color to products weighing thousands of kilograms more than itself. It is impossible to find this product for 500 liras or 1,000 liras per kilogram. However, we come across these prices."

"They dye corn cobs, coconut yarns and even horse hair and offer them for sale as saffron," Manavoğlu warns, adding that imitiations fail to replicate the spice’s distinctive attributes.