Iranian saffron vs. Kashmiri saffron

Iranian saffron and Kashmiri saffron are both quality and difficult to distinguish and both have a high aroma and taste.

Why do we choose Iranian saffron instead of Kashmiri?

Iranians have a 4,000-year history of planting this plant. They know well how to cope with droughts and heavy rains. Their knowledge about growing this plant is not comparable to anywhere in the world and Iranian farmers produce up to 95% of the world’s saffron. But in Kashmir, natural crises can greatly affect the quality of their products. You can easily find this in articles related to Kashmir saffron on the Internet.

If you search the internet for articles about Kashmir saffron, you will find cases of various crises, whether with long periods of bad weather that affect product quality or fraud in their products, even articles on smuggling. You can find Iranian saffron to India to complete the Kashmiri product.

Iranian saffron have a relatively uniform quality and they have a lower price in Iran, which is the main place of production. India has a high tax on Iranian saffron to protect its Kashmir market, and rightly so. That is why traffickers use mules to smuggle saffron into India, much like drug traffickers do. This leads to the mixing of Kashmiri and Iranian saffron as Kashmiri saffron, so again you will pay more to buy saffron because it is Iranian saffron, but you bought it from India instead of buying it from Iran, and also it is more expensive.

This also happens in Spain. Spain produces about 1 ton of saffron every year, but exports about 80-100 tons of saffron every year. Spain imports Iranian saffron and mixes it with La Mancha saffron and then sells it as Spanish Mancha saffron, although the majority is Iranian. Meanwhile, the quality of Iranian Negin and Super Negin saffron is much higher than the quality of Spanish La Mancha saffron, and Lamancha saffron is equal to the cheapest type of Iranian saffron, namely pushal saffron.

Therefore, buying Iranian saffron means that you buy saffron without fraud and quality from the saffron house and where 95% of the world’s saffron is produced, without paying extra. But buying from anywhere else in the world means that you have bought the same Iranian saffron from Spain, Kashmir or Afghanistan, and of course at a higher price and less originality.